European Civilization, 1648-1945 Yale University

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 1 Transcript

Professor John Merriman: I'm John Merriman and this is History 202. I'm here every Monday and Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. to 11:20 a.m. The way this course is, these are all really major themes. I'm going to go over this a little bit, and I'm going to talk about some of the themes. I kind of lecture on things that I think that complement what you're doing. Let me give you an example. When I talk about the New Imperialism, why it is that Europe basically took over the entire world between the 1880s and 1914, you can read the chapter in A History of Modern Europe, which I had fun writing, but I lecture on the Boy Scouts. I often say that I lecture on the Boy Scouts because I was thrown out of the Boy Scouts in Portland, Oregon, when I was a kid, because I didn't manage to accumulate a single badge and was totally useless after sports seasons ended. But that's not why I do it. To understand the New Imperialism, why Europe took over essentially all of Africa, where they had places that were totally uncharted that suddenly became highly contested between British, French, German, and Italian conquerors, one has to understand the culture of imperialism. The ordinance of the Boy Scouts in Britain has a lot to do with that. Why generations of British youth and their counterparts in Germany, and even Australia, New Zealand, and other places, began to think that it was important to be able to look at a map in their schoolhouse that had the color red for Britain increasingly taking over the map of Asia and Africa, and lots of other places as well. So, instead of -- at the very beginning of that lecture, I'll say, "Look, there are three things you really ought to know about the New Imperialism, why they did this." Then I talk about the Boy Scouts, so that those two things will fit together. Or, when I talk about World War I, and we'll have two lectures. My friend and colleague, Jay Winter, is doing one of them on the Great War and modern memory. Instead of trying to do the entire war, and there is, I think, a quite sporty chapter on that in the book, I'll talk about trench warfare. You'll see a film called Paths of Glory. That's an early Kubrick film about the mutinies in 1917. I'll talk about the mutinies in 1917 when people just said, "Enough is enough. There's no sense dying for nothing. We won't go over the top." Which is to say that it's important to come to lecture, and it's important to come to sections. I've cut back on the reading. I used to use about four more books than I use now, but it's better to concentrate on what you're doing. The books are A History of Modern Europe, second edition, which I wrote for people like you. Then you'll read Persian Letters, not all of it. That would be a rather lengthy day or so. You'll read excerpts in Persian Letters, and Montesquieu

talks about relations between West and East, and it's a phenomenal moment in the history of the Enlightenment. Then you have a pause where you're basically just reading me, for better or for worse, but I hope for better, until you get to mile Zola, his great novel, Germinal, which is a classic. Zola was the first sort of naturalist novelist, at least in France. When he wrote Germinal, germinal means budding, like the budding of trees. But he means the budding of people being aware of themselves as workers. He went down to the mines in the north of France in the Anzin. One of the heroes of the book is a woman called Catherine, who is fifteen years old, but has seen a lot of life for being fifteen years old. When Zola wrote Germinal, he went down into the mines to look at fifteen-year-old young women, barely older than girls, working in the mines twelve hours a day. It's a book that resounds with reality. It's really kind of an amazing book, and I think you'll like that. I hope you will. Then Helmut Smith's The Butcher's Tale is about accusations of ritual murder in a German town. It's about the second German Reich, and it's about anti-Semitism in a small place with bigger consequences. George Orwell went off to fight the good fight in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where it was sort of a dry run for an even more horrible war, and even more horrible fascists. It's about his engagement and disillusionment in the Spanish republican forces, the loyalist forces, and about the tensions and the duplicity of Stalin's folks undercutting the Trotskyites and undercutting the anarchists. It's one of those classics that's a classic for a very good reason. It's really a marvelous read. Finally, there's Ordinary Men. I go to Poland a lot. In the last couple of years I've been there four or five times for various reasons, and I'd never been to Auschwitz. I went to Auschwitz a year ago. I don't know, some of you have probably been there. As you're going through the horror of it all, and as you're seeing empty suitcases with people's names on them that the people don't exist anymore, and you're seeing baby shoes and things like that. You think, "Who could have done this? Who could have gone out and simply, in an assembly line way, killed people?" Or in fields around Lodz, which was a large industrial town and still is in Poland, simply gone out and blown the brains out of mothers, babies, grandmothers, and anybody they found. Who could have done it? Well, the answer that Chris Browning has is ordinary men. And he had the quite brilliant idea of looking at a German unit, essentially policemen from Hamburg, the port town of Hamburg, an old important Hanseatic port. And he follows them from the lives of very ordinary people into the killing fields, it was nothing less than that, of Poland. It's also short. Germinal is long, but these other ones are short. It's gripping. It's quite amazing. So, those are the books.

I think that A History of Modern Europe--I hope--is fun to read. I think you will enjoy that. The lectures kind of--you see the themes speak for themselves. Sections, everybody likes Wednesday night sections. One of my colleagues has only Wednesday night sections. We've gone increasingly to that, because sometimes you don't find a large audience even on Friday morning 10:30 slots. We've abandoned that. So, tentatively, we're going to have two at 7:00 p.m., two at 8:00 p.m., then Thursday at 1:30 p.m., and Thursday at 2:30 p.m. I don't know. When are we starting sections? Sometimes we don't do it until the second week. It depends on what day. What day is this? Wednesday. I don't know. Maybe we'll start them next week. Maybe we won't. Who knows? But they will happen, and there's also a short, sporty paper assignment. By short I don't mean two pages, but something like seven pages, eight pages on something that you want to write about. Now, let me give you some examples just off the top of my head. If you have any interesting in painting, for example, it would be interesting to take looks by, say, two Impressionist painters like Pissarro and Renoir, and to see how they viewed the transformation of nineteenth-century Paris, the big boulevards and all of that. Or you could take another novel. Germinal, one of the interesting things about it is that it's a document of history. It's a novel, so these are invented people, but it's a document of history in some ways, as is lots of the great literature of World War I. There isn't any period in modern history that has so much gripping literature about it as the Great War, the British war poets like Siegfried Sassoon. And a lot of these people were dead after they wrote. Sassoon wasn't, at least not immediately. I can't remember if he dies in 1918 or not. But to take some of the poetry, or the writing of the war, and write a paper about it. Or, if you're into diplomatic history, or something like that--I don't know, a paper reevaluating the origins of the Crimean War. That might put you to sleep before it puts your TA to sleep. But you can imagine a good paper on that. You can do whatever you want. When I do the Enlightenment, borrowing from my good friend Bob Darnton, I'll do a thing at the beginning about why the Enlightenment was important, what it is. There's secularization, rational inquiry, and all of that, stuff that you may already know, maybe not. But it's in the book. But then what I do is I look at some of the third string, or the third division in the European football sense, of Enlightenment hacks, and what they wrote about royalty, and about aristocrats, and the way they kind of undermined those traditional hierarchies that would be swept away, to a large extent, by the French Revolution. Or you could take somebody out of the French Revolution, such as the steely Saint-Just, who ran off with his mother's silver at age sixteen or something and went on the grand tour of France, and talk

about him on the Committee of Public Safety that signed away the lives of lots of people, but may have also saved the revolution. You can do whatever you want. Well, it should have something to do with the course and in the time period we're talking about. Nothing on the Red Sox or something, but you would work with your teaching participant. I'm an email animal. I'm always available on email, and I have office hours as well, but people don't come much anymore. They're doing NBA.com, because email has made office hours sort of oblivious. I mean, irrelevant, not oblivious. But people are oblivious to my office hours. But, anyway, they are Mondays, 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. It used to be 3:00 p.m., but I just sit there by myself, 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. in Branford College, K13. There are also two other movies when we get to fascism, when we get to Adolf Hitler. He was only one of a whole bunch of dictators. There were hardly any parliamentary regimes left in continental Europe by the time 1939 comes. A woman called Leni Riefenstahl, who just died in 2002 at age 102, when she was a young woman did a propaganda film for Hitler. Hitler, like Mussolini, believed in high tech. He was one of the first people to use the radio. Franklin Roosevelt used the fireside chat of the radio. But Mussolini was already there piling falsehood upon falsehood, and Italians who could barely afford to eat all had their radios. The same thing happened in Germany as well. She did a movie, a documentary called Triumph of the Will, about Nuremburg. It is truly chilling. It's amazing, it looks like a political convention or something in some ways. All of these movies you can see in the privacy of your luxurious suites in Branford or Pierson College or wherever, because they're available now in ways I don't even understand, but on your Internet. We used to actually show them here. I used to use a great movie called The Sorrow and the Pity, Le Chagrin et la piti. It was four hours long. People described it as a two six-pack movie. The janitors complained because there were so many beer bottles rattling around. But, of course, this was before the drinking age was raised. So, of course, I don't show that movie. I take that back. I don't take that back, but what the hell. Anyway, I don't show that movie anymore. But I do show Triumph of the Will, and you can watch that at home. The other one is Au revoir les enfants. Because one of the last lectures I talk about resistance and collaboration in Europe, and because I live in France much of the time, I talk about France. Au revoir les enfants, Goodbye Children, some of you have probably seen. It was made by Louis Malle, who just died a couple of years ago. It was about when he was in college, so he was the equivalent of 7th and 8thgrade. There was a new boy that shows up at

school during World War II in Fontainebleau, which is just southeast of Paris. He's a boy who hadn't been there before. He's a Jewish boy. It's about his friendship with this boy, and what happens. At the end, it's not a happy film, but it's a great, great film. What else? What to say? There's a midterm. I don't like to waste a lecture giving a midterm. I would rather give a lecture, but we have to have something to report to you. If you tube it, if you don't do very well at all, we don't count it as much as if you do well. People ask these questions, I know. How much is it worth? Geez, there's more to life than grades, but it's something like twentyfive percent and the paper is twenty-five percent. Section participation is ten percent, whatever we work out, then the final. It's an exercise in seeing how you're doing. It really is no big deal, but it will help you pull the themes of the course together. It's no scary situation. We all live in this sort of A-, B+ range. I'll tell you, a couple of years ago I ran into this student. When I run into students, I'm a friendly guy and I see people, and I say, "Hi, how are you?" I ran into this one person. I said, "Hi, how are you?" And she went, "Oh, hello." Oh? I remembered her name and I went and looked it up, and there was the B+. It wasn't that, "Hi, how are you? A- or A," but whatever. I'm sure she had all A's in the other courses, and a B+ is not the end of the world, and most people get A's, but whatever. You have to take the midterm. That's the way they run it here. That's not my idea, so that's what we're going to do. Okay, now I'm going to talk about some of the themes. At the end, I'm going to read you a poem. I started history in a serious way because I read this poem. So, I'll leave that until the end of it. I didn't got to Yale. I went to the University of Michigan, maize and blue forever, very sad since last weekend. I came from Portland, Oregon. I don't know if any of you come from Portland, Oregon, but that's where I'm from. When I went off to Michigan, I'd been at a Jesuit high school. Jesuit high school was a sports factory, in part, but it was a very good school, but it was very repressive. I went off to the University of Michigan after having been in Jesuit school for four years. It was wine, women, and song. There weren't enough in the middle and probably too much of the first. My first semester I got a 1.93 grade point average, and my mother asked me if that was on a two-point scale. I'm serious. I had an F. I shouldn't laugh at myself. My kids say, "Oh, my god, not the same story again." But I got an F, and I got two C's, and I got a B. The people I hung around with in Ann Arbor were so unaccomplished, some of them anyway, that they thought I was smart because I got a B. I'd go by in the dining room and they'd say, "He got a B." They asked me to tutor them. Can you imagine that? Some of the people that I hung around with were amazing. You may even know people like that, but I don't think so.

But one of the guys that I knew, I've got to get back to the topic in a minute, but I just thought of this, was sort of the king of malapropisms. One day he was going on and on. These are the people I hung around with. He was going on and on about this good meal that he had of one course after another, and it was fantastic. It was a really good restaurant, and somebody snuck him some wine. Finally, I'm tired of the whole thing and I said, "Was it gratis?" He said, "No, it was chicken." Those are the people that I hung around with at the University of Michigan. But I've taught here a long time and I stand by maize and blue, but I love Yale. One of the things I love about Yale is being able to teach people like you. And I mean it, and I love this course, so I hope that you will enjoy it, if indeed you take it. What about some of the themes? What kind of stuff are we going to do? Could you get some syllabi for some of those folks back there? They're up on the thing. Thanks a lot. A couple of themes. I don't believe, and I've never believed, that history is a series of bins. I guess I wrote that in the book, but that you open up and you say, "Well, there goes the Enlightenment. Shut that baby down." Then you open up the next one, and here comes eighteenth-century rivalries, and you shut that baby. Then the French Revolution, "Oh, I know all about that now." Pretty soon you go on to Russian Revolution eventually, and all that. To do a course like this where you're going to learn much of what is important to know about western civilization, I do believe, if you do the reading and stuff, and if you enjoy the lectures, there have to be some threads that go all the way through that make it worth it so you learn something. One is certainly state-making. Even if you take a sort of federalized, decentralized state like with this very bizarre electoral system like the United States, that the growth of modern states, it doesn't really just come in the twentieth century with the welfare state beginning in England, and even before that in some other places, insurance programs and things like that. It begins with the consolidation of state power in the late Middle Ages with territorial monarchies, the Spanish, and the French, and the English monarchies. It has a lot to do with the growth of absolute rule. That's what I'm going to talk about next time, absolute rule, absolutism. The growth of standing armies, huge standing armies, never seen before, of big forts built on frontiers. It has a lot to do with bureaucrats who could extract resources from ordinary people. A lot of the rich didn't pay anything or hardly anything at all. It has to do with an allegiance, a dynastic allegiance that could be transferred later to a nation, the idea of nation. That starts in the eighteenth century. It doesn't start in the nineteenth century. It starts in the eighteenth century, at least in Britain. That's an argument that we'll make also. In 1500, which is kind of when that book gets rolling--they only start in about 1648--there were about 1500 different territorial units in Europe. Some were no bigger than Archbishop's

Garden in Germany, and some were larger states--not yet what they are now in terms of size, such as France, which expanded under Louis XIV into Alsace and Lorraine, and various other places. But there's about 1500 territorial units. In 1890, there were thirty. So, the consolidation of state power, which is looking at it from the state out, or the emergence of an identity where you see yourself as German as opposed to Bavarian, French as opposed to Gascon or Provencal, Spanish as opposed to Castilian or as opposed to Catalan. The Catalan language was illegal until 1975, until Francisco Franco finally croaked in 1975, in November. This is a great phrase; I wish I'd said it originally. I don't know who said it, but someone once said that a language is a dialect with a powerful army. That's it. That's true. France at the time of the French Revolution, half the people in France knew French. There was bilingualism. You could know Catalan. You could know Auvergnat patois. We live in the south of France where a lot of old people still speak a patois, though that's mostly dying out. How does it come that identity, a sense of allegiance to a state or a country? Not everybody, but how does it come to 1914 when people go marching off to get killed singing the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, in pretty good French? How does that happen? How does a state increase its reach? How is the modern world created? We call this process, it's a clumsy word, but state-making. How do states form? The other side of this is how do identities change? In the sixteenth century, seventeenth century, ask somebody they were. Say, "Who are you?" They'd say, "I'm so and so. I'm of this family." Or, "I am Protestant," if it was the sixteenth century or late sixteenth century, any time after 1520s or 1530s in parts of Germany. "I'm Protestant. I'm Jewish." In much of the Balkans, "I am Muslim." In most of Europe, "I am Catholic." In Eastern Europe, "I am Russian Orthodox. I live in a mir (village) in Russia." How does that happen by the end of the nineteenth century that people have, even Russia as they're starving to death, starving in the famine that Tolstoy, the great writer, called the world's attention to. A lot of them died in fields thinking, "only if the czar only knew that we were starving, and that his ministers were treating us bad, how angry he would be." Well, they didn't get it. They didn't know that the czar could have given one damn. But the allegiance to the czar, the sense of being Russian or being dominated by the Russian czar, is something that had to be constructed. So, the state constructs its ability to extract taxes, extract bodies for national armies, also to provide resources, but identities are transformed. So, I give this as an example, because statemaking is one of the themes that kind of ties everything together. This course ends in 1945, but look at the problems in the post-communist world of state-making. Look what's going on in Georgia, which is more complicated than the newspapers present in very many ways. Look

at the horror show of the Balkans in the 1990s. A lot of the issues, religious hatreds that we thought only would be limited to Northern Ireland. That's another theme that's very important to the whole thing. Another, of course, is economic change. Obviously, this is not a course in economic history, but the rise of capitalism, that's what it's called, capitalism or large-scale industrialization. It changes in ways that we'll suggest in the reading, and then I'll talk about a little bit, the way people live in very fundamental ways. There's lot of continuities, but there's lots of big changes. Everybody doesn't end up in the assembly lines right away. There are other ways of rural production. Women's work remains terribly, terribly important. I'll spend some time doing that. A very dear friend of mine, my mentor indeed, Chuck Tilley, who just died a couple months ago, to my great sadness, once said that "it's bitter hard to write the history of remainders." Lots of people were left out of all of this. I'll do one lecture when I talk about popular protest. I'll take three examples of people rebelling. I stand back and say, "What does this mean? What is going on here?" I take the example from the Pyrenees Mountains, a place called the Arige. You're not responsible for that name, would never be. But where suddenly men dressed as women carrying guns, or carrying pitchforks, came down out of the mists, out of the snow and drove away charcoal burners and drove away forest guards. Why? Because they'd lost access to glean, to pasture their miserable animals. Because the wealthy, big surprise, got the law on their side as the price of wood goes up. They didn't walk around saying, "Well, I'm a remainder. Eventually, I'm going to have to move to Toulouse and my great-great-grandchildren will work in the Aero Spatial, in the air industry there." They didn't say, "I'm remainder number 231." But they fought for their dignity, and for a sense of justice they thought existed at one time that had been taken away by these economic changes they couldn't control. Then I take an example from the south of England, from the same time, 1829, 1830, when they find people dead with only dandelions in their stomach, dead of hunger. Then these people start marching the poor, the wretched poor. Rural laborers start marching and threatening people with threshing machines. Why threshing machines? Because threshing machines were taking away their work as harvesters. And one day they found a sign that said, "Revenge from thee is on the wing from thy determined Captain Swing," suggesting that they were many. They were righteous. They were just. They were armed. They were ready. Did Captain Swing exist? Of course not. They were weak and they get lost. They get defeated. Some of them are hung. Lots of them are sent to Tasmania to the prison at Port Arthur, Tasmania. They're sent to Australia. That's why when the Australians play the English, a lot

of the Australians sing that old Beatles' song, "Yellow Submarine," which you don't remember, which I vaguely remember. "We all live in a convict colony, a convict colony, a convict colony. Captain Swing, they lost, but they went down fighting. It's bitter hard to write the history of remainders. But when you look up from that and you say, "Look what's going on here." When you look at people fighting for grain, fighting for food, they're fighting a larger process that they can't control. But it tells you a lot of what's going on over the big picture. That's another one. Then there is, I'll just take one more, maybe another ten minutes. I'm going to read you my poem. Then you can go. But I hope you come back. War--war as a dynamic of change. Warfare changes with Napoleon. There were already changes in the eighteenth century, but it's still basically professional armies or people getting conscripted in the British navy, because they were drunk at the wrong place at the wrong time outside of a tavern in Portsmouth or something. The next thing they know, they're throwing up on a ship bobbing off toward the English empire. But warfare changes with the nation's state. The French called it leve en masse, that's mass conscription, the sense of defending the nation. There's this magic moment where the artisans of Paris defeat the highly-professionalized army at a windmill called Valmy in the east of France. It changes the way things were. Napoleon is arguably the first total war, because of a war against civilians where there are no longer the traditional limits between fighting against civilians and fighting against armies. Those limits hadn't existed in the Thirty Years' War. I'll talk a little bit about that next time around. But the wars are very different. There's famous Goya paintings of peasants being gunned down by French soldiers, and atrocities against peasants in Calabria in the south of Italy. So, warfare really changes, but it becomes a dynamic of change. If you think about the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Revolution was not inconceivable without World War I, but it was sort of inconceivable without the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the defeat by the Japanese in an extraordinary shocking event, at least for Europeans in 1904 and 1905. And World War I provides opportunities for dissidents in Russia to put forward their claims. So, when the whole thing collapses on the czar's head in February 1917, and the Bolsheviks come to power, the war itself was a dynamic of change as well. And what a war. What wars. There have been nothing ever like it. A few journalists who had been in the Russo-Japanese war had seen trenches in Manchuria that had been built. But nobody could have imagined that the war that was supposed to be over in six weeks was going to destroy four empires--the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the German empire, and the Russian empire, and, arguably, we can talk about this and we can debate this, the British empire. Because lots

of people who had fought in India, Indians who had fought in the war, or people now we would call Pakistanis who'd fought in the war, or people from Kenya who'd fought in the war are no longer going to be satisfied with simply arguing that they're part of the great empire, even though they have hardly any rights and no money, and simply work for the big guy. So, the war transforms Europe by destroying these empires. What it also does, and it's very possible to argue this, and my friend, Jay Winter, who is a great expert on World War I, and Bruno Cabanes also, who's on leave this year, would agree with this. You could see the whole period in 1914-1945 as a new and more terrible Thirty Years' War. Because Europe is in depression all through the 1920s and 30s, agricultural depression the whole time. Only between 1924 and 1929 is it not a big industrial depression. The poisoning of the political atmosphere--I'm going to do a whole lecture on Hitler and the national socialists. World War I created Hitler. He was already just this pathetic guy with grandiose plans, no friends, and sort of a sad sack going to the theatre and droning on and on about all he knew about Wager, whom he loved, and the theatre, and in a threadbare coat. But World War I transforms him into an anti-Semite. He was already an anti-socialist. It transforms him into an anti-Semite. The troops that came back, many of them simply kept on marching. They'd survived the war and they kept on marching. The poisoning in the political atmosphere was something that was simply extraordinary. To understand fascism, this is terribly, terribly important, you have to understand what happens in World War I. Great expectations dashed the Treaty of Versailles, which only the great British thinker, John Maynard Keynes, really got right, predicting the disaster that came out of it. There's no more fascinating period in history, in my mind. It's absolutely fantastic. What a war. It's all obvious. Everybody's seen these films from Imperial War Museum -- which has been kind of wrecked the way they've done it now, it's sort of too high-tech -- in London. But I leave you with just a couple thoughts. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 that started on July 1st when they blow the whistle and say, "Over the top, guys." There are more British soldiers killed and wounded in the first three days of the Battle of the Somme, S-O-M-M-E, three days, three days, than there were Americans killed in World War I, Korea, and Vietnam combined. In three days. Where are the great British leaders of the 1920s and the 1930s? They're all dead. They're hung up on that old barbed wire, as one of the war poets put it. They're hung up on that old barbed wire. One guy, a soccer player, said, "We'll get some enthusiasm." He tried to dribble a ball across these trenches, across the craters. He doesn't make it. He's killed. In 1914 on Christmas Day, the Germans and the British soldiers, some would say, "Enough of this stuff" for the day. They sing to each other. They actually play soccer; they play football. In 1915, a

British soldier said, "Let's do the same thing." They put him against the wall and shoot him. The horror of the war transforms Europe, every aspect of Europe. It's impossible to understand the growth of the agrarian sort of semi-fascist regimes in Eastern Europe, very much under Nazi influence, without understanding World War I. The war that was supposed to end all wars; of course, it doesn't do that at all. That's a big stop on our agenda as well. We did used to read All Quiet in the Western Front, but everybody's read that. Then we read Robert Graves' rather long and self-indulgent Goodbye to All That. That was pretty long, so we don't do that. But we will try to rock. Let me just read you my poem and then you can go. Well, you can do whatever you want, but anyway. I remember this. I remember reading this poem back at University of Michigan at 2:00 on a Saturday, trying to figure out what I'd done the night before. But, anyway, no. This is Brecht, the great East German poet. It's called "A Worker Reads History." Let me begin by saying that we're going to study "great," I mean really "great" men, "great" women. Hitler is obviously not a great man. He's awful, just awful. But the people who are thought to have made history: Napoleon, Peter the Great, other people. I do talk about the folks that you read about in textbooks, including mine. But I ask the same question and pose to you the same question that Brecht poses. It's a short poem, so just hang on. Who The Was And Who The In Where Is Did Were The full of the all her built city the built books it kings Babylon the city up with when the of triumph. triumph? palaces? the And are who the filled hauled so each seven with the many time? In lived Chinese go? reared Byzantium even sea in them which those wall gates the craggy names blocks times of Lima's built of of of Thebes? kings. stone? destroyed. houses, it?

glittering evening did arcs

gold, the masons Who

who was Imperial up? lives

finished Rome

Over in of the

whom song. legend in,

Caesars dwellings night

Atlantis

rushed

The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. Young He Caesar Was there not beat even a the cook in his Alexander conquered India. alone? Gauls. army?

Philip Was Frederick Who Each At Every sunk

of and Great

Spain destroyed. triumphed

wept Were in

as there the with a the a no Seven

his other Years'

fleet tears? War. him? victory.

the

triumphed page whose ten expense years

victory great

ball? man.

Who paid the piper? So So many questions. If you hang with us this semester, we'll get at some of those. See you. Thank you. Thank you. many particulars.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 2 Transcript September 8, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: So, what I want to do today--again, this is a parallel holding pattern lecture. I'm going to talk about absolute rule. This parallels what you're reading. It's just to make clear, with some emphasis, about the importance of the development of absolute rule. Now, one of the points I made last week, for those of you who were here, is that one of the themes that ties European history together is the growth of the modern state, of statemaking. This tends to be an awkward expression or term that is used by historians. If you look at the way states are in Europe now, whether they be relatively decentralized, such as Great Britain, or extraordinarily centralized, as my France, the origins of the modern state must, in part, be seen in this kind of remarkable period of European history from the early seventeenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century. Now, we have a process in late Medieval Europe of the consolidation of territorial monarchies. You did have monarchies like Spain, England, and France, namely. Those were the three most important ones, in which rulers consolidated to brush claimants to power aside and consolidated their rule. But the period of absolute rule really begins in the midseventeenth century, and is to be found in those states that had specific kinds of social structures. This is a point we'll come back to, particularly when we're talking about the two most important states, two of the great powers of the period that did not have absolute rule. And which, in the case of England, the civil war was largely fought, to a great extent anyway, trying to prevent the English monarchy from taking on characteristics of those emerging absolute states on the continent. I'll talk next Wednesday about English/British, because Britain doesn't exist until 1707, selfidentity and how not being an absolute state is part of what emerged in the sense of being British and being Dutch certainly, arguably even more, had to do with that because of the proximity of the direct threat to the Dutch by the megalomaniac, Louis XIV, who modestly refers to himself as the Sun King. So, between 1650 and 1750, and this is right out of what you're reading, the rulers of continental Europe, of the biggest states, extended their power. And, so, there were two aspects of this. One is they extend their ability to extract resources out of their own populations; and, second, they work to increase their dynastic holdings at the expense of their neighbors munching smaller states, or by marriages, or by wars against their big rivals.

One of the most interesting examples of that is the Thirty Years' War, which starts before this course and ends before this course or with the beginning of this course, 1618-1648, which I'm going to come back to a little bit in a while--they say while it begins as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics, it ends up being a dynastic struggle between two Catholic powers consolidating their authority over their own peoples, and expanding their dynastic domains, thus Austria and France. That's an important point, because it tells you what really is the big picture that is going to emerge. So, when we're talking about the growth of absolute rule, we're talking about France, that is, the Sun King; Prussia, particularly Frederick the Great about whom you can read; Russia, Peter the Great, about whom I will have something to say in a week or two, I don't know when; Austria, aforementioned; and Sweden. Sweden kind of disappears from the great power state when they're defeated by Peter the Great in-when is it?--1709. Now, what did it mean to be an absolute ruler? What it meant was that in principle, your power was greater than any challenge that could come from those underlings, those craven reptiles in your imagination over whom you ruled. But there's a balance to it that I'll discuss in a while. There really can't be a challenge to them from the state itself. So, they make their personal or dynastic rule absolute, based on loyalty to them as individuals and not to the state as some sort of abstraction. Of course, one of the interesting things that we'll hear about in a couple days is the fact that British national identity, which is formed precociously early in European history, arguably in the seventeenth century and for elites perhaps even before, has this sort of constitutional balance between the rights of parliament, victorious in the English Civil War, and loyalty to the monarchy. So, absolute rulers assert their right to make laws, to proclaim or to announce laws with the waive of their chubby hands, to levy taxes and to appoint officials who will carry out their will. So, it's possible to talk about the bureaucratization of medieval states if you want, but when you look at the long-range growth of bureaucracies as part of government, as part of state formation, that's why the growth of these bureaucracies is one of the characteristics of these absolute states in all of these big-time powers. So, what they do is--well, let me give you a couple of examples. One thing absolute monarchs don't want is they don't want impediments to their personal rule. What was a kind of impediment to their personal rule? One would be the municipal privileges. For example, in the German port towns, Lbeck and Hamburg and the others, they formed this Hanseatic League, and Germany remains to be centralized. There are all sorts of states. Some are more powerful than others. But Germany is not unified until 1871.

But if you think of Spain, if youre hitchhiking through Spain or something like that, or through the south of France, or Eurail passes, and if you go to a town like Avila in Spain. Avila is one of the most fantastic fortified towns in Europe. Or, if you go to Nimes in the south of France, you'll see boulevards that people race motorcycles around all the time and they keep you up all night. There are no walls there anymore, because the king had them knocked down. So, what happens with municipal privileges, towns that had municipal privileges, these are eroded and then virtually eliminated by powerful potentates. In the case of Nmes, N-I-M-E-S, which was largely a Protestant town, they knocked down the wall so the Protestants of Nimes could not defend themselves against this all-conquering Catholic monarch. So, municipal privileges--walls were put up for a variety of reasons around towns. Plague, for example. Dubrovnik, one of my favorite cities in Europe. Dubrovnik had these magnificent walls you could walk all the way around. They have a quarantine house where they would put people who were travelers arriving there, because walls kept out plagues. Walls keep out malfaiteurs--evil doers. They keep out bandits and things like that. The doors literally slam shut at night. There was a case of a very minor insurrection in an obscure Italian city in 1848 where the people of the town literally locked the ruler out of the town--and Italy remains decentralized. The tradition of these decentralized city-states that were the heart of the Renaissance. Italy is not unified--to the extent it has ever been unified--until the 1860s and 1970s. What these kings do, these kings and queens is they get rid of these impediments to their authority. Even take the word burgher or bourgeois. Bourgeois is a French word. It's more of a cultural sense, but it also has a class sense. A bourgeois or a burgher was somebody who lived in a city and assumed that some of the justice that was levied against him or her would be the result of decisions taken locally. Now, big-time, powerful absolute monarchs don't want that. So, part of the whole process is the elimination of these municipal privileges and replacing municipal officials, to make a long story short, with people that they have appointed. They eliminate--the one privilege above all that the big guys want to get rid of is the right to not be taxed. Part of being an absolute ruler is being able to levy taxes against those people who have the joy or the extreme misfortune of living in those domains, and more about that later. So, what happens with all this is that absolute rule impinges directly on the lives of ordinary people more than kingly, or queenly, or princely, or archbishiply power had intruded on the lives of ordinary people before that. So, these rulers have a coercive ability in creating, and I'll come

back to this, large standing armies that will be arriving not immediately, they're not arriving by train or being helicoptered in at some distant command, but they will get there if there's trouble. They will arrive and they will get there and they will enforce the will of the monarch. We'll see the statistics are really just fascinating about how big these armies become. The argument that I'm going to make, drawing upon again Rabb--he's not the only one that's made this argument, but he's made it more thoroughly than most people--absolutism may be seen as an attempt to reassert public order and coercive state authority after this period of utter turmoil. The English Civil War, the Thirty Years' War, in which in parts of central Europe a quarter of the population disappeared, were killed, murdered in ways that I will unfortunately show you in a while. More than this, what happens is that the nobles, who in all these countries going back to the Medieval period, had privileges that they were asserting vis-vis their monarchs, they will say, "We agree to be junior partners in absolutism in exchange for the protection that you, the big guy, and your armies can provide us, so that we don't have to lie awake wondering who is coming up the path to the big house. Is it peasants who are come and assert the rights of the poor against us?" And at a time of popular insurrections in all sorts of countries. Think of all the insurrections or all the people who followed false czars to utter slaughter in Russia. The nobles say, "All right. We agree to be junior partners in absolute rule in exchange for recognizing your supreme authority over us in exchange for the protection that you will afford us." Private armies are disappearing. The armies of the state, as you will see in a while, are growing, and moreover, "you, oh big guy, you will assert our own privileges. You will recognize our privileges as nobles." So, it's a tradeoff. But in absolute states, there's no doubt who rules and who helps rule. So, in absolute states big noble families are very happy to send their offspring to become commanders in the army and navy, where they never do a damn thing, or to become big bishops like Talleyrand, and to profit from the state while recognizing that the big guy, the king and the queen, have absolute authority over them. Now, the classic case, of course, Louis XIV you can read about. Louis XIV when he was a kid, he was about twelve or thirteen years old, he lived in Paris. He lived in the Tuileries palace along the Seine, which was burned in 1871 during the commune. There was a huge old insurrection called the Fronde, F-R-O-N-D-E. A fronde was a kind of a slingshot that Paris street urchins used to shoot fancy people with rocks as they rode their carriages through the muddy streets of Paris. It's a noble insurrection against royal authority, and in Auvergne in central France you have people rising up against their lords saying, "Hell with you. We're not going to pay anymore." When he's a boy, he hears the crowd shouting outside of the royal

palace in Paris. It scares the hell out of him. At one time they burst into his bedroom and he's a little guy. When royal authority conquers these rebels, the frondeurs--you don't have to remember any of that, F-R-O-N-D-E, it's good cocktail party conversation, or something like that, but it's important--he makes them, literally, he's a bigger guy then, they literally come and they bow down, and they swear allegiance to him in exchange for protection and the recognition of their privileges as nobles, as titled nobles. That's really the defining moment in absolute rule. What does Louis XIV do? He goes out and builds Versailles. He only goes back to Paris I think three times ever. He doesn't like Paris. Versailles is only eighteen kilometers away. It's about eleven or twelve miles away. The women of Paris in October, many of them will walk to Versailles to bring the king back to Paris. After that, he's essentially, well to put it kind of ridiculously, toast, French toast, when that happens. He builds this big--I call it a noble theme park, basically, at Versailles. It's not the most interesting of the chteaux at all. The most interesting is Vaux-le-Vicomte, which is southeast of Paris. It's a big sort of sprawling--gardens everywhere. Ten thousand nobles lived there. How boring! But the point was that they could be watched, that they're not going to-they can chase each other's wives and mistresses around, and they can eat big drunken meals. The chteau was so big that when it freezes, they were trying to get to the bathroom and most of them never made it and peed on these long corridors that some of you have seen. The wine would freeze on the way from the kitchen through--it is sad--to the big dining hall. But he has 10,000 of these dudes and dudesses there that he's going to watch over. They can conspire against each other, and they can hit on each other's wives and mistresses. He could give one damn. But he can control them there. He only goes back to Paris three times ever. All the time he's expanding his own personal power vis--vis his own population, conquering Alsace and parts of Lorraine and going to these inevitable natural frontiers. Napoleon thought the natural frontier was the Pacific Ocean. That would be another story. So, this is what, in a nutshell, kind of what absolutism was. But let me say two things now, after having said that. There were doctrines. You can read about this stuff--geez, it's obvious. But there were doctrines of absolutism that originated with jurists early. This was out there. There was a theoretical conceptual framework for having a king or queen having absolute powers. Even the development of this theory of absolute rule is in response to the rise of these territorial states like Spain, and France, and Russia later. France is a good example. I quote in here a guy who croaks before this course starts, Jean Bodin, B-O-D-I-N. He says, "Seeing that nothing upon earth is greater or higher next unto God than the majesty of kings and sovereign princes," he wrote in Six Books of the Republic, "the principal point of sovereign majesty and

absolute power was to consist principally in giving laws, dictating laws, onto the subjects in general without their consent." So, for absolute rulers, the link to religion you can read about, but there's always the sense that he or she is doing God's will by exploiting ordinary peasants, ordinary people and conquering other territories. But there's a theoretical framework, and it will catch up with the French monarchs, among others, later--that the ruler must be a father, a benevolent figure. As I said, in some context last time, how many Russian peasants died in the 1890s thinking, "Oh my god, if the czar only knew that we're starving, how angry he would be with his officials." Well, he could have given one damn how many millions of them died. But this was the image, that the big person is there to protect you, and that his glory is your glory. But along with this conceptual framework, provided by none other than Thomas Hobbs in England, who had lived through the English Civil War and thought that you shouldn't mess around with this rights business, you need some sort of big powerful monarch there--but there was a sense inherent in all of this. This will be important to try and understand the French Revolution, La Rvolution franaise, that there's a difference between absolutism and despotism. And that even conceptually, theoretically, if the monarch goes too far against the weight of the past that there is inherent in this the idea that he or she might well go. Of course, you can imagine the thoughts of Louis XVI as they were cutting back his hair to await the fall of the guillotine on the 21st of January, 1793. In the cabarets and the estaminets, the bars of Paris of which there are many, many, many--happily so--in 1789, when ordinary people are drinking to the Third Estate, and talking about despotism, and finding examples from what they saw around them as representing despotic behavior. That line had clearly been crossed and helps explain why it was that in a country in which there weren't ten people who wanted a republic in 1789. It was possible to imagine life without a king. Imagine that. So, that's there as well. Now, let's characterize--oh, geez. we've got to move here. Let's characterize absolute rule. Now, you did have, in many of these countries, diets, or parliaments, or some representative bodies. Again, the king doesn't have to call them. In the case of France again, since we're talking so much about Louis XIV, they call the Estates General, which is to represent all the provinces after the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 or 1612. Appropriately enough, he was stabbed to death in a traffic jam in Paris when his carriage gets blocked in the center of Paris, and this mad monk sticks a big knife into him. So, they call the Estates General then, but the king never calls it again until 1789. So, you have these diets and you have these parliaments,

but one of the characteristics of absolute rule is that you don't have to call these bodies, because the king is the big person. Now, in the case of England, one of the causes of the English Civil War is the refusal of the kings to pay any attention, to recognize the rights of parliament that people in the British imaginaire, in the British collective memory--I believe started on June 15th, which is my birthday, 1215, although I wasn't born yet in 1215. And, so, the idea of the freeborn Englishperson, Englishman is what they would have said in those days, meant that rights of parliament had to be respected. When it looks like those kings are going to restore Catholicism, at least have lots of paintings of swooning cherubs, and cupids, and Baroque Italian art in Windsor, and London, and these other places, then you've got a revolution. So, absolute rulers didn't really have to pay attention to these assemblies. The best example I can think of offhand, I should let this wait, but Peter the Great, the czar of the Russians, who may or may not have beaten his son to death, at least he ordered him tortured. Peter the Great was a huge sort of power-forward-sized guy at a time when people were very small. He had this thing called the drunken assembly, which was in a way kind of a mockery of parliamentary representations where his cronies would come and just get wasted and would make all sorts of flamboyant proclamations that seemed to represent what a real parliament would do. But in fact, Peter the Great listened to whom he wanted to and ignored the others. And sometimes had them killed if he had to, if he thought that's what he should do, because there wasn't any sort of challenge to his authority. That, my friends, is part of what it meant. So, I already mentioned about how nobles become junior partners in absolutism. That's not a bad phrase, junior partners in absolutism. So, what happens? Two ways of measuring how this happened and what difference it made is to realize, to return to what I said earlier, that big state structures involve bureaucracies. So, the king's representatives go out in the name of the king. They give out justice, or the lack of justice, or they send armies in, or taxes, or this stuff. Now, the Renaissance city-states of Italy had relatively efficient administrations, to be sure. But these are royal bureaucracies that expand dramatically in size. Even though decentralized England expands its bureaucracy and collected taxes much more efficiently than across the channel in France, state-making involved more officials there. So, in order to raise money, you have to enforce taxes. So, you may farm taxes out to someone. They'll keep as much of the cut as they can possibly steal. Or to make money you'll sell noble titles. This gets the French kings into trouble. Or you sell monopolies. Peter the Great had a monopoly on dice, because people gambled a lot. The nobles gambled all the time. You could gamble serfs, real people. You could gamble them.

You could lose them with a bad hand. This was Russia. So, the monopoly on dice he sells. He sells the monopoly on salt. Salt was a big commodity, obviously, for storing meat. That monopoly is sold in various places. So, these officials, nobles get these kinds of officials, and really, they could rake it in, get these titles and they are representing the king. They're governors, or intendants you call them in France. And it expands the number of officials dramatically. Then there's warfare. There is nothing more symptomatic of the growth of absolute rule than the growth of powerful armies. Again, when you traveling around Europe, if you're lucky to do that, you'll see these big fortified towns. In the case of France again, they are the work of a brilliant military engineer called Vauban, V-A-U-B-A-N. You go to a place like Perpignan or Lille or Montmdy, they're all over the place. And these are fortress-like defenses in an age of essentially defensive warfare. But if you're going to have a big old fort, and you're going to have lots of cannon that you hope to use against your craven, reptile enemies that would want to get in your way, you've got to have people to try out the cannon. You have to have people who live in these fortifications. So, the size of the armies for these megalomaniac wars, these dynastic wars between Austria and France--and then they changed partners in 1756, and all of this business. You can read about that. But the big story is huge, huge, huge amount of troops. During the sixteenth century, the peacetime armies of the Continental Powers were about 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers--very, very little. By the 1690s, 150,000 soldiers. The French army, which was then in the 1690s 180,000 people. That's twice the Michigan football stadium. Can you imagine a stadium packed with soldiers and all that? How boring. But, anyway, it rose to 350,000 soldiers, the largest in Europe. I think I have in this edition a table the size of European armies. Habsburg empire, 1690, 50,000; 1756, 200,000. A polyglot army, too, because of all the different nationalities. Prussia identified with the Junkers, the nobles who were army officers, the dueling scars that they had--that Bismarck would have in a unified Germany, a mere 30,000 people in 1690; 195,000 people during the Seven Years' War; in 1789, 190,000; in 1812, as they're fighting Napoleon, 270,000 people. This is in a state that barely extends beyond Brandenburg and Pomerania in what now is Western Poland, and still Prussia in the unified Germany. Even Sweden, 100 at the time of the Battle of Poltava. Forget it. Well, don't forget it, but read about. In 1709, that's when Sweden loses to Russia. The Swedish army was 110,000 people, soldiers. That's an awful lot. So, that's one of the things that happens. The modern state in action, the absolute state in action is the army. Even in peacetime, military expenditures take up almost half of the budget of any European state, and in times of war, eighty percent.

Having said all that, let me just--oops, try to turn this baby on. Did that go on? Why didn't that go on? Oh, I've got to put this thing down. That's it. Again, these just illustrate my point, which is: Why did nobles and even other people agree to all of this? If they're being exploited, they've got big armies that can crush them like grapes if they get in the way. But one argument that can be made is that things were so terrible and so out of control in the earlier period that the strengthening of the state is something that people saw as beneficial. Again, Hobbes is over the top. Hobbes wants this sort of dictatorship to keep people from brawling in the state of nature. Again, the elite in Britain were scared, because you've got all these Ranter groups and Levelers and people who believe that everybody ought to have the right to vote, whether they have property or not and people that believe in the right of women. This is pretty scary. So, people like Hobbes thought, "Well, we need a really strong state." But that's not the outcome of the English Civil War. But how did this work in other places? Theodore Rabb's argument is basically that the terrible wars of religion that had ripped central Europe apart in the middle of the nineteenth century led people to look for the kinds of safety provided by a strong ruler. That what had begun, and we'll see this in a minute, as a war between protestants and Catholics, a war that began in Prague when somebody gets defenestrated, which is a fancy word for throwing somebody out of a window, that this ended up being a war fought by just vicious mercenaries who slaughtered the populations of central Europe. It didn't matter if they were Protestants or Catholics or anything else. They simply killed them. And that this terrified elites in much of Europe and had the same equivalent of what the Fronde did for scaring elites in France. One of the arguments that he [Rabb] makes, and I can't make it as strongly because I don't know enough about it, is the scientific revolution. What I know about it is what you're kind enough to read. It was hard to piece all of this stuff together. But there is this sort of sense of uncertainty that you see in someone like Descartes, who finally just goes back to basics and says, "I think, therefore I am." Here I am. They go from there to a methodology of science, a methodology of trying to study things in a rational way, to get rid of the kinds of blind faith that seem to have led to this, this utter catastrophe of mass slaughter in Europe. There are signs all over the place that this has happened. "I think, therefore I am." There is a return to these kinds of theoretical defenses of absolutism that even preceded the growth of the absolute state as I've described it. Absolutism did not simply just emerge out of this turmoil. As I already suggested, and I would insist upon this again, that the consolidation of territorial rulers had already given the basis to an expanding, more formalized state structure, even in England. This is for sure. It all just doesn't start like that. Louis XIV was

preceded in number by Louis XIII. Louis XIII helped expand the compelling course of structures of the French state. But yet when you look at all of this, you can see that the kind of chaos, the political upheavals finds in response in the growth of central government authority and the growth of bureaucracies. It wasn't only in Sweden, Austria, Russia, France, etc. where you found this. Even in smaller states like Wrttemberg, a state in Germany which was a sort of middle-sized state. Even there you see the same phenomenon on a very lower, smaller level, at least in terms of the size of the state, where people are giving up, willing to compromise on their privileges in order for the protection of the ruler of Wrttemberg, who would never be confused with Louis XIV or Peter the Great. So, this really becomes a sort of European-wide phenomenon. You can apply this also to the Glorious Revolution in England as well. People are happy to have a monarch back who is going to reassert control. In the case of England, they're very happy to have a monarch back who was not threatening to turn England again into a Catholic state. So, this is the sort of argument that you can make, even in a state that had a constitutional monarch such as England. Let me just give you a couple examples of what one can mean here. Again, these are painters that you may have come across. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of them or if you never think of them again--but, Titian. The famous Titian. This is his picture of Charles V at a battle in Germany in 1648. This is a pretty dramatic representation of war. This is like Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This is a guy, he's armored up; he's ready to go. He's somebody to be emulated from the point of view of the viewer. But at the same time, this is slightly earlier, this is a painting--thanks, Dan--this is a painting of Bruegel the Elder. The first is the Triumph of Death, where you see what happens in real battle when people are just sort of slaughtered, and the commanders are off at a safe distance. Here again, the massacre of the innocents, where villages are just being executed because they are there. The Triumph of Death, the dialogue of the mathematician Pascal is quoted by Rabb. "Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed." "Why? You do not live on the other side of the water, my friend. If you lived on this side, I should be a murderer. But since you live on the other side, I'm a brave man and it is right that I kill you." When the Swedes get into the act, Gustavus Adolphus brings this huge old Swedish army down and they do a lot of damage, too, and people are absolutely being devastated. Here's Reubens' The Horror of War. There's a reason why the first attempt to even write about international law comes at this period. Again, this is before the course, but why not? Hugo Grotius writes the Law of War and Peace. He publishes it in 1625. The goal was to stop stuff like this, to try to create a legal framework in which states could resolve their kind of

differences without kind of butchering each other. So, there we go. But somewhat here in war and peace of battle is slowly being relegated to the background. But let me give you another example. Here's the famous Spanish painter. Again, don't worry about it. Velazquez, who died in 1610, I think. No, it's 1660, sorry. This is his portrait of Mars. Mars is the god of war. Now, how different that is than the portrait of Charles that you saw by Titian. Here, this guy looks like kind of an overweight NFL player who hasn't really gotten ready for the drill. He's very human. There's nothing admirable about him. It's just war is being dissed by those people that are just so tired of the killing. And Mars has this sort of human, flabby torso that's not--it's sympathetic, but it's a different portrayal of war. People are getting tired of the whole damn thing. He's dull. He's uncouth and he's extremely human. Now, one of the reasons why people would--it's unthinkable for someone like me or for probably most of you to imagine giving up your rights to a kind of absolute rule, though we seem to be in a situation like that, where that's happened quite a lot recently, even in this own country. But these are just illustrations that come out of the Thirty Years' War, which people are trying to put behind them. This is a French painter, drawer, lithographer called Jacques Callot. These are just many ways that people died during the Thirty Years' War. This is simply The Execution. You don't even need the formal titles of these. But these get around. Peddlers who had these big, big leather bags that would go around Europe and sell things like pins and miraculous images of the Virgin Mary and the stories of saints and all this kind of stuff and Joan of Arc or Robin Hood, in the case of England, become part of the collective memory. These kinds of images do get around of the horrors of war that the misfortunes and horrors of war, which is basically what he calls this entire series. Here's the people sort of standing around watching this execution. This is somebody being tortured at the stake for merely existing, for having not confessed to being a Protestant or a Catholic or whatever. I'll tell you, in the south of France near where we live, when there was a lot of resistance in World War II against the Germans, there were some Protestant villages there that were noteworthy for their resistance. A lot of Catholics resisted, too. But one of the interesting things about some of the villages that I know down there is that there were big mission crosses that were put out after the wars of religion that were sort of symbols of conquest by the all-Catholic king. Is it in the collective memory that people remember three centuries later that the Catholic Church was identified, at least as a hierarchy, with the Vichy Regime in World War II? That's interesting, a fascinating subject. But, anyway, this poor guy's not doing very well up there and becomes this sort of big spectacle. These are dying soldiers along the side of the road. It's sort of a sympathetic look

at--that's the name of this--of these expiring dudes there. Here's the attack on a stagecoach. The point of this is it didn't matter who you were. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were history. That was all. There were new ways to be killed. Certainly in Europe, not until the massacres of the Armenians, and arguably some Napoleonic atrocities, and Napoleon's armies' atrocities in Palestine, or in the south of Italy, or in Spain as well. But there was nothing like this really, including World War I. There were some atrocities at the beginning of World War I, but there was nothing like this again until World War II and, of course, Bosnia. The point is this is why lots of people thought, "I don't like this guy sending people around and taking my taxes, but I don't want to get offed by some marauders. Just hang em high, hang em all high." These were real ways that people were executed --stakes, massacres, and this sort of business. There's a convent, church that's going to go. It's a Catholic church. You can tell from the top. So, maybe these are Protestant mercenaries. It didn't matter, because the Protestant armies had Catholic mercenaries and the Catholic armies had Protestant mercenaries. Everybody had Dalmatians, people from the Dalmatian coast, and Swiss. You have to imagine a time when Switzerland wasn't extremely wealthy. Swiss were great, famous mercenaries fighting in these armies. Again, the Swedish, the "Swedish cocktail" was sort of suffocating people by stuffing manure down their throat until they died. This was a nasty time. I guess this is what Hobbes meant by "nasty, short, and brutish," or whatever the fourth was. I don't remember, but what life was in the Thirty Years' War, that was the way it was. Now, out of all of this, again to repeat, we are not making the argument that the Thirty Years' War itself led to absolute rule, that the growth of state structures can be seen in the beginning and the late medieval period with the consolidation of these territorial monarchies. There were already bureaucrats representing the royal will. There were already armies. But many, particularly two--bureaucracies and powerful standing military forces--are characteristics of modern states. And to try to explain why it was that absolute rule came to Europe at the time it did, one has to not only look at the particular structures of states, but one has to look at the overview and the sheer horror of it all. The boy king, Louis XIV, hearing the crowd shouting outside of his room. He goes out to Versailles and creates this noble theme park and sort of a Euro Disney for nobles where he can watch these nobles. They agree to be junior partners of absolute rule and they weren't the only ones. The great power struggles of the eighteenth century would be very different than this bloodletting of civilians that had preceded it. There were professional kinds of armies and all of that. But those are more themes for future lectures. Wednesday I'm going to talk about

exceptions to absolutism, what the Dutch and what the English had in common that gave them very different political outcomes. That's important, too, in the emergence of the country in which many of you live. See you.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 3 Transcript September 10, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: We talked about different political outcomes. Over the long run, Great Britain remains a constitutional monarchy; even in the nineteenth century, when Victoria had great prestige, she did not have great power. The Netherlands also resisted absolutism, and the Dutch Republic remained the Dutch Republic; although, for reasons that we'll see later, the Dutch Republic ceases to be a great power in the eighteenth century. Given the very different route that Prussia, Austria, Russia, Sweden, and France went with a centralization of absolute rule, why did it work out so differently for England/Britain and the Netherlands? Again, this is the second and last of these sort of holding pattern lectures. This parallels exactly what you are reading. Again, until we get our class set and all that, then there will be a very different kind of lecture starting next Monday. But let's just think out loud about what these places had in common, and what this tells you about social structure and political outcomes in early modern Europe. Of course, the consequences are enormous for other kinds of outcomes. Let me give you an example. Germany is not unified until 1871. Ironically, unification proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Chteau of Versailles, which we'll visit for a few seconds later on. The fact that German unification was achieved by Prussia and that Prussia was dominated by nobles, who were called Junkers, you'll come to them later, and by an army which--the state basically was an appendage of the army--had rather enormous consequences for Europe in the late nineteenth and above all in the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s people paid a lot more attention to social structure and class analysis. But when you look at the experience of Britain and the Dutch Republic, they do share things that, in a way, determine the kind of political economy that they would have. What are some of these things? I've written them on the board. Let's just start in that order and think aloud. Then what I'm going to do for the last twenty or twenty-five minutes is talk about the Dutch Republic. You can skip that part in the reading, which isn't very long, and illustrate with some paintings, for which you are not

responsible, but just to make the points I want to make about the nature of the Dutch Republic, and in which you'll see ways in which it was very similar to England/Great Britain and very different in terms of France. First of all, it's not a coincidence that in both England and in the Dutch Republic you had, along with the city-states of Northern Italy, you had the largest percentage of middle-class population that you could find in Europe. The middle class in Russia, which I'll talk about on Monday, was just absolutely miniscule. The middle class was extremely small in Prussia. Prussia did not include the Hanseatic League cities, such as Bremen and Hamburg and the others. You have in the Netherlands and in England an astonishingly large middle class. Moreover, in the case of England, there was tremendous fluidity between elites. The percentage of the population who was noble, who had noble titles, was extremely small. Privilege came from wealth and wealth stemmed from the land. Yet, because of the rapid and dramatic expansion of the English role in the global economy, you had lots of very wealthy landlords, property owners investing in commerce, whereas in Spain and in France, and Prussia in particular, it was seen to be sort of slumming for nobles to participate in commerce. Marxist analysis has given us this all too rigid picture of the nobility sort of letting their nails grow long, "they are nobles because they do nothing." That was part of it. Certainly there were nobles in France who bought up vineyards around Bordeaux. There are nobles around Toulouse who have invested in commercial agriculture. But yet the fact remains that it's really in England that you have this tremendous fluidity within the elite, and that basically commercial money talks as much as propertied money talks. London, already by the late sixteenth century, one-sixth of all the people, I think this is E. A. Wrigley who pointed this out a long time ago--one-sixth of all the people in England went to London frequently, because London was absolutely gigantic as a city. The only cities in Europe that were comparable--and they were smaller--were Naples, an extraordinarily poor city, and Constantinople, Istanbul, and, of course, in Japan, Edo, which would become known as Tokyo. The percentage of the English population that would have considered themselves to be middle class is extraordinarily large. The same is even more true in the Netherlands. There were, to be sure, nobles in the Netherlands. They tended to live in the eastern part in rural Netherlands and in the south. But their lives and interests were far, far away from that economic large machine, which was Amsterdam. Amsterdam is dominated by the middle classes. Now, the middle class want political rights. They want prerogatives. They want their privileges for

themselves. It is fair to argue that non-titled people in England were at the forefront of the victorious role in the civil war that parliament played. In the city-states of Venice, which was a major trading city already on the decline, and in Florence, and in Milan, and in Turin, and in places like that you find something very comparable, but Italy is not united until the 1860s. Northern Italy has a large percentage of the population who are middle class. But in talking about the political outcomes of states, that doesn't really fit into our analysis here. Part of that is that along with Northern Italy, the Netherlands and England/Great Britain have, by far, the most urbanized population in Europe. If you go into what now is Serbia, there basically was Belgrade, which was a small place. Poland had very lively, important cities, Warsaw and Krakow, and Gdask as well. You can't just say, "In Eastern Europe there weren't cities," but there isn't any place, including France, that had a remotely as high a percentage of the population living in cities as England and the Netherlands. One of the great shifts in English/British history that you will become aware of is the shift of economic dynamism in England away from the south to the north. In the time we're starting this course in the seventeenth century, besides London, which is this gigantic place, the biggest cities in England were Norwich and Exeter, and York in the north. Of course, with large-scale industrialization, which begins in the middle of the eighteenth century, you'll see this dramatic shift up to the north. Manchester, which was a small town, becomes this enormous city, and Liverpool becomes ever more important. Cities are where the middle class lives. Bourgeois and burghers, as I said last time, are urban residents who are losing their privileges on the continent to big-time absolute states. They will defend, quite vociferously, their privileges as townspeople against absolutist pretensions of nobles, in the case of the Netherlands and also, to an extent, in England as well. They share those things in common, which is not to say that a country like France wasn't urbanized. Paris is already enormous. There are about 500,000 people at the time of the French Revolution. There are so many people you can't count, because they own nothing. Also, we don't have accurate censuses until the nineteenth century. The first accurate census, I think, is in Copenhagen at the end of the eighteenth century. Most censuses were taken, by the way, as a way of counting heads, the number of people who had to be fed at the time of a siege. We're kind of guessing on these population figures. The fact remains that the Netherlands and England/Britain share this. This is important in terms of political outcomes, and also important in the case of England/Britain in what we've come to call the Industrial Revolution, which I will talk about at another time.

Secondly, as I tried to suggest the other day, these places resist absolutism. The English Civil War, it's kind of a generalization to underline that too much, but nonetheless, people living in England in the 1640s saw that there was a real threat to the idea of the freeborn Englishman that was coming from the trampling of long-assumed rights, since at least the thirteenth century, at least in the imagination of people by kings who wanted to dispense with the rights of parliament and run things as they wanted to. In the case of the Netherlands, it's the same thing. There isn't anything as dramatic as the English Civil War, but the important outcome is that in the end this decentralized federalist structure, which I describe in the book and we'll talk a little bit about in a while, is victorious over the pretensions of a potential dynastic ruling house, that is the Orange House, the House of Orange, who wanted to make the chief Dutch official, who was called the Stadtholder-- you can read that in the book--and wanted to turn that person into kind of a thundering, semi-absolutist monarch. That doesn't work as well. When you think of the origins of the Netherlands, it comes from a civil war, or a war of independence against the Spanish absolutist state, that begins in 1572 and goes on and off all the time until Dutch independence is recognized--it was a fait accompli for a long time, but until the Dutch independence was recognized in 1648 at the Treaty of Westphalia. For the Dutch when they imagine scary things, a scary thing is an army sent by the king of Spain to extract more taxes from the wealthiest of all the Spanish provinces--that is, the Netherlands-rich because of commerce and, as we'll see in a minute, to try to force people to remain Catholics at a time when the vast majority of the Dutch population had converted to Calvinism. Those people who believed in the Dutch Republic, which was the vast majority of the people, just as the majority of the population of England held to the rights of parliament, they have this scary scenario of their rights being violated, trampled upon, destroyed, eliminated, eradicated by big-time absolute rulers. The other scary thing for the Dutch is, of course, the big guy down south. Louis XIV would love to control all of the Netherlands. His invasions at one time are turned back when they literally open the dykes and flood the French armies back. In the mental construction of the Dutch and the English both involves one thing they don't want to be. That is to lose their prerogatives, their rights to an absolute state. In both cases, this becomes part of their self-identity. That's an essential part, as my good friend, Linda Colley, who used to teach here and sadly is not here anymore. She's at Princeton. She made an argument in her very successful book called Britons, the construction of British identity. I will argue later in the course, in 1848 it has to get reinvented again by imagining an other, who is perceived as sneaky and dangerous,

and of course in that case it's the French, but also the point of view of the British, the Irish, who are conceived of as being capable because of their quest for--"I don't want to be trampled by the English, especially by English Protestants"-- of hooking up with France, which they tried to do in 1798, or in World War I with Germany, because there were some attempts by the Germans to stoke up Irish independence movements. Again, the only point here is that they see themselves as anti-absolutists. This helps them create this sense of identity, which helps determine their political origins. You'll find nothing comparable in Russia, obviously which I'll come back and talk about, or in Prussia, or in France. You can talk about the origins of French nationalism in the middle of the eighteenth century, but it's very closely tied to this dynasty, at least until they lop off the guy's head in 1793. So, that's that point. Third is decentralization. Both of these states are decentralized states. The British don't have a police force until 1827 or 1829, I can't remember which, when Robert Peale creates a London police force which they call the Bobbies, after, like, Robert, Bob, Bobbies. People didn't want that. They didn't want a large standing army. What have they identified large standing armies with? They always had to have a large standing navy for obvious reasons. But they identified large standing armies with France or with the Spain of Phillip II or with Prussia or with Russia. So, it didn't mean that the English state wasn't efficient in collecting taxes, because they were more efficient than the French were in collecting taxes. But it does mean that this decentralization is an essential part of who they thought they were. The local sheriff will call out the guys and restore order when there's trouble. There is this real fear that large standing armies could ultimately compromise the rights of freeborn Englishmen. That's in a way that they would have put it. In the case of the Netherlands, which I'll come back to in a while, you have these provinces that--although Holland, which is the province of Amsterdam, is by far the most important and most prosperous of the Dutch provinces, such as that we often miscall the Netherlands Holland, in fact Holland is just one of the provinces, as if you called the United States New York or California, because those are the two most powerful states in the United States. But this decentralized federalist structure is part of who they thought they were and who they continue to think they are. This is very different than these absolute kings who can send out their armies, can run by their minions to squish whomever they want like grapes whenever there's trouble.

We can exaggerate the power of Peter the Great in this vast empire that's expanding south and already expanding toward Siberia and such distant places. It took a long time to get the guys there. But when they got there, there was hell to pay. Very, very different than this federalist decentralized structure of both of these countries. The political outcome is different. You can also make that argument, this isn't the course to do that, but you can make that argument about the United States and the evolution of the United States, because of the prestige of local leaders and the decentralized nature of the colonies already at the time of the War of Independence--which is going to have a strong role in the political outcome, for better or for worse--in this country where you have this sort of wacko political system that still exists because of people screaming, "state's rights," and all that. But that's another subject. Fourth, anti-Catholicism in both cases. Why? Because these are major countries in the Reformation. The English Reformation, which begins with Henry VIII wanting to divorce and kill his various wives along the way, still had an awful lot to do with the resistance to the power of Rome and the power of the Catholic Church as an institution. In the case of the Netherlands, anti-Catholicism is endemic. Why? Because it's identified with the Spanish empire, with Spain, which not only wanted to extract taxes and other revenue from its most prosperous province, but wanted to force people to remain Catholic. When they send this guy called the Duke of Alba up to the Netherlands, he burns people to the stake and all this kind of stuff. The association of Catholicism as the dominant religion in both of the enemy countries, France and Spain, is extremely important. This is not to say that the Dutch don't fight the English, too, because they do. There are various wars over control of the seas. But nonetheless, in the imagination, in the imaginaire, in the mental construction of these two countries, what we are not, that is Catholic, helps define their identity. Of course, the particular problem of Ireland, the challenge of Ireland as I suggested earlier, has an awful lot to do with that. And the reinvention in the nineteenth century of British identity will also have a lot to do with fear of the Irish, "the enemy within," as they were perceived. But more about that. I'll talk about that a lot and try to explain there was no revolution in England in 1848. In the course of Britain, it's even clearer. The French are "the sneaky French." From the French point of view, it's the perfidious Albion already there. You can go all the way up to the origins of World War I to see. When the British get into World War I, it's because of the violation of Belgian neutrality by the Germans, because the idea of having another enemywe've already got the French across the channel and it's not that big a channel. You can swim across it. I couldn't and you couldn't either but lots of people have. They do it all the time. But if you've got the Germans in

Ostende eating moules frites, eating mussels with French fries, and you've already got the French there, this is unthinkable. So, they go to war. I don't want to exaggerate this too much, but the largest riots in Britain in the eighteenth century are not the riots for political reform at all. They are the anti-Catholic riots called the Gordon Riots, which take place in London. Anti-Catholicism is very much strongly entrenched in the British sense of who they were. Anti-French--there we go. Those two are already linked, along with anti-absolutism and antiCatholicism. Last, and all these things are linked. You could do one of these little boxes they do in sociology or political science, and have these arrows running all over the place. You could make it there. Who are the biggest trading powers in Europe? We forget about the enormous trading vitality of Asia, even sea vitality and land vitality at the same time, but they are without any question by this point--with the decline of the Spanish empire, which begins before this course--the Dutch and the English. What this does is it increases the role of this commercial middle class. It increases the role of cities, particularly port cities, which Amsterdam is. And it increases the role of these economic elites or their concern with maintaining their privileges against threats to their privileges and to their prosperity no matter where they come from. Just to amuse yourself, not for any kind of punitive think-about-the-exam exercise, but it would be fun to take these categories and think about these other countries, particularly those who were absolute states, other large important states in Europe and see to what extent you have these factors there. Prussia, I already said, you've got your big nobles. You've got all these guys with dueling scars, and for them to be indulging in commerce is just crass, and not terribly manly, and all this business. You've got your flute-playing king, Frederick the Great, who could be awful. He could lash out. Voltaire went and hung out with Frederick the Great, and after a while he said, "Let me out of here." But you've got Berlin, which was a very important town, but it's a very important city because it's got this huge garrison and it's got factories turning out military uniforms. It's got Potsdam Palace and all of this. It's not at all the same thing as Amsterdam, or London, or any of the other trading cities around. In the case of Russia, it's even easier. You've got a practically nonexistent middle class. You've got all sorts of nobles. They are involved in commerce, some of them, but mostly what they do is they serve the state. They're called service nobility. They're not serving the cities. They're not serving commerce. What they're doing is they're doing is they're serving the state. They're serving this huge, lumbering, strange guy, Peter the Great. Then you could take other places, like Italy and smaller cities. But you don't yet have these big state structures. So, if you're looking back, say, from the end of the nineteenth century, it's not easy

to see, but you can see these--don't ever think that history runs on railroad tracks, and all you need is the timetable to show when modernization shows up. That's a most ludicrous word, really, in contemporary social science or orthodox Marxist, where you just had to say, "Well, eventually the proletariat will rise up, because the bourgeoisie did this before." But yet when you look back from the nineteenth century, these factors do count in explaining how countries turn out to be the way they are. When you try and look at the origins of World War I, it mattered that Germany is run by this kind of madcap dufus, Wilhelm II, who was intellectually lazy and liked to break bottles of Riesling over bright, shiny battleships and didn't concentrate on things very long, and sends off provocative telegrams here and there to make everybody mad. That has a long-run outcome, which cost the lives of millions of people. Anyway, here we go. It's just kind of fun to think about that, so that's what we are doing. We're thinking about that. Now, let's dim the lights. Here we go. How do we dim the lights? I can't remember. Is that good? We've got to get further down than that. So, the lecture Okay, now paralleling what you've been reading, let's look a little bit at the Dutch Republic, because people talk about England and Britain all the time, so let me talk about the Dutch Republic. This will kind of bring some of these factors together, along with the idea of what people thought they were. What is their identity? Here again, we'll look at some paintings. You're not responsible for these paintings, but we'll illustrate ways in which the Dutch Republic, and their social structure, and what they emphasized, and who they thought they were was very different than, for example, la belle France. So, here we have Amsterdam. It grows dramatically because of this global trade in the seventeenth century. That was 1613. I made this. It's all a bunch of jumble. But this is 1640, or something like that--later. But what you have are these canals. Many of you, or some of you have had the good fortune to go to one of Europe's most wonderful cities. The canals were used to transport goods. Thus, the city structure itself, the way the city was built with houses along the canals reflects the economic primacy of global trade. At this time the Dutch are sending herrings, these long flat boats, herring ships are going all the way to Newfoundland in the seventeenth century, and Iceland, freezing off the coast of Iceland. They control and dominate the Baltic trade, and herring is an important part of that, because herring will keep once it's salted and all that. The city of Amsterdam grows up not only as part of this victorious struggle against the Spanish armies. There's a wonderful book by my former colleague, Geoffrey Parker, called The Spanish Road, which talked about how difficult it was for the Spanish to get troops

all the way to the Netherlands. They had to go from Italy, because much of Italy was controlled by Spain, through the Alps all the way up along the Rhine and finally get into the Dutch Republic. It was a losing battle. But Amsterdam reflects this kind of primacy of the global economy, because it's such an important trading power, but also this federalist decentralized aspect that I've tried to describe. This is the shipyard behind. In fact, this building behind is still there. I go to Amsterdam--not frequently, but I've been there ten or twelve times, or something. I did a Yale trip there. I remember we took all these alumni around to look at all this stuff. That was mildly fun. What the Dutch did--the Netherlands is an extraordinarily small country, and it's the most populated country in Europe, then, per square kilometer, and is now--once. What they have to do in order to feed the population, you have to have more land. How are you going to get more land? One of the incredible things if you're driving, say, from Groningen, and you're going to go all the way down to Amsterdam, when you drive along the coast, you're driving along this sort of road that's out in the sea. All the land between the water on the left side and a long, long way has been reclaimed from the sea. This is the seventeenth century. This isn't scuba diving now off the Great Barrier Reef, or something like that. What they're doing is they're reclaiming the land from the sea. What this has to do with global economy is that you have to be able to feed the population. They have, along with the English--and these two facts are related--an agricultural revolution. They have an agricultural revolution, investment in commercialized agriculture, and increase in the production in rural areas. In the case of the Netherlands, it's because of this. I'll talk about why it happened in Britain another time. It's because they reclaimed land. How much land do they reclaim from the sea? Well, 36,000 acres just between 1590 and 1615. That's a phenomenal amount, and they keep going over and over again. The population of the Dutch Republic increases between 1550 and 1650 to almost two million people. This is in a pretty small--it's bigger than Belgium, but this is a pretty small territory. Amsterdam, by mid-seventeenth century, by 1650, increases to 150,000 people. They build these three large canals and this expands the area of the city by four times. What this means is that boats can dock outside these kind of big warehouses and can unload or, depending on the case, load goods. You have 500 miles of canals dug just in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. It becomes this economic dynamo because of that, and thus traders are to be found everywhere. In the 1630s there are 2,500 trading ships. They become the principal supplier of grain and fish in Europe. The Dutch dominate the Baltic trade. Cities like Gdansk, which we tend to forget about, unfortunately, which is a very important port then and still

now. It's where Solidarity began, too, as many of you know, in 1980. It's an important port in all of this. They reach the East Indies in the 1620s and the 1630s. They bring back cinnamon, nutmeg, and all sorts of valuables. It's this kind of wealth that allow them to fight this long, hard war of independence, which they finally win. Now, why is this in here? This is Rembrandt, as most of you know. This is called The Night Watch. The importance of this painting is who is being painted and, more than that, who is getting Rembrandt to paint this. If you go down into France, if you go to la belle France, the painting is dominated by nobles who want pictures of themselves, or the tiresome Sun King and all his sort of miserable hangers-on, very rich, miserable hangers-on. What the Dutch painters painted reflects in the same way that Renaissance art reflected what was important to Renaissance Italy. Who did the commissioning of painting? I care because my mother was a painter, she was a portrait painter. That's how we survived in Portland, Oregon. Who commissioned these paintings and what they painted tell you who these people thought they were. That's pretty interesting. Who are these? This is The Night Watch. These are the guys who run Amsterdam. This is essentially the town hall of Amsterdam. In fact, that building itself, of which I don't have a slide, is extremely modest. It looks so terribly different than anything like the Spanish palace outside of Madrid or anything that ever had anything to do with the Prussian kings and all that. Well, that's pretty obvious. This is the weighing house. Here, this is very classic. I'm not a professor of architecture, but it's obvious this is northern European architecture that you can see in northern France, cities like Arras and other places, or Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes. It's one of the most fabulous plazas anywhere. Or in the Place des Vosges, which is by far the most beautiful plaza in Paris, you have this kind of architecture. But this is the weighing house there. Here's another one. The buildings are the most important. Buildings in the cities are not huge, overthe-top Baroque churches, such as the Gsu in Rome, for example. They are weighing houses. The town hall was in very modest proportions because it's Calvinist. Calvinists weren't exactly what the French call rigolo, weren't exactly wild, fun-loving types. Even the churches are completely denuded of the kinds of Baroque, swooning cherubs and clutter that you found in--beautiful, I'm not knocking the Baroque--but beautiful churches--or, in Vienna it's a good example of that, or anywhere is a good example of that. Here's another weighing house. This is in Gouda, as in the cheese, but the town of Gouda. Amsterdam wasn't alone. Now, here, these are houses that are built along the canals. You've got these warehouses along the canals and here's where the bankers--the Dutch had the most,

along with the English, sophisticated banking system in the world. Lloyds of London, which now does things like insure quarterbacks' knees and things--but it begins in the eighteenth century when people go into the docks. Because a lot of these ships go blub on the way back, or are taken by pirates and stuff like that, they say, "We want to insure this ship. Will you sign up for ten percent of the value of this insurance?" That's how Lloyds of London starts. But you had the equivalent in Amsterdam as well. You have access to capital by those guys, these guys who are no longer there. The middle class guys behind the screen who are going to invest in these long treks. You send off a ship to Newfoundland, or to Iceland, or even to the Mediterranean. They start getting into the Mediterranean and that scares the hell out of their commercial rivals. So, you also build these houses for people to live in. Because there's not a lot of room between the canals, that's why they're so steep when you walk up these things. It's almost like that. It's an incline. They seem to be reaching toward the sky there, but not reaching toward the sky as in the cupola of a Baroque church where you're supposed to see God at the top. Here, they look up and they see money at the top, or whatever. They were religious as well, but it was a different kind of religion. Here, this is a more modern example with a little hash caf next to it or something. This is Rembrandt's house. He had to live somewhere, and that's where he lived because he paints these people. Rembrandt did have one time where he started painting kind of Catholic themes, but basically he's like these other guys. They're painting--I'll tell you in a minute. But they're painting middle-class life in the Netherlands. They don't do big battle scenes. You have to go to the southern Netherlands or Belgium for that, or into France. That's what they do and that's what they look like. That's pretty obvious. This is an orphanage. They had, without question, the most sophisticated charitable institutions anywhere. In fact, we know what they ate. It was the most prosperous country for ordinary people anywhere. The diet here, we know what they ate in their meals. They ate much better than poor people did almost anywhere else. Indeed, some ordinary workers bought paintings by Steen and all sorts of these other people. Here is a workhouse. This is a prison, basically. They were organized for that, too. It was the place of toleration. There's no doubt about that. During the Enlightenment, the works of the philosophesthat could not be published in France were published in Switzerland, more about that another time, and in the Netherlands. But they could lash out. They lashed out at gays sometimes. They lashed out at Catholics sometimes. There was an edge to them, as if the whole thing could collapse on their

heads. Simon Schama is not the only person who made that point. Others have as well, perhaps because of the big floods. If the dyke goes--here's the image of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke. If the dyke goes, you are drowned. There's this whole sense that the thing is precarious and you'd better kind of mind your Ps and Qs, or whatever the expression is, and be a good person or this whole thing could kind of be literally flooded away. How different that is than this modest estate of Versailles. I worked in the archives in Versailles in the small stables. This is one of my least favorite palaces. The way the Dutch thought about themselves is a little different than the way the French nobility or the Spanish nobles, at least at the higher ranks, thought about themselves as well. I show these. These are obvious, but just to put them in comparison with what you'll see in the middle. A little modest bedroom there in Versailles. This is the war room, it's called, the salon de guerre. I don't like Versailles. What the hell. This is Vaux-le-Vicomte, which is much more interesting. I just put this in because I like it. It shows you there were chateaus in the Netherlands, but they were mostly in the east. They were nobles that had the chateaux, and they didn't dominate; they didn't rule. Vaux le Vicomte was fabulous. Louis XIV was invited by his treasurer, a man called Fouquet, to go and eat there. He was insanely jealous. They served him on gold plates with gold silverware, and he had huge ponds stocked with not only freshwater fish but saltwater fish. He was so jealous that he threw him in the slammer, threw him in jail and confiscated it. But the image is just that this is very different. The paintings you found were very different. Here's Rembrandt himself. That was Rembrandt. That was quick. Narcissism--he did something like seventy self-portraits. He was his own favorite subject. Anyway, my mother tried to paint me, but I'd never hold still long enough. There's only sort of two half-finished portraits of me. Anyway, what did people paint? Ruysdael, don't write this down. Well, you can if you want. Go to the great museum in Amsterdam and see it at the Rijksmuseum. Ruysdael painted ordinary people living and at work. These are windmills, obviously. Here are windmills with people. This is different. Generally, you wouldn't find these kinds of paintings in other places. This is a painter called Frans Hals, H-A-L-S. It's a family scene. These are middle-class people commissioning paintings of themselves. It's the equivalent of fancy patricians in Florence having paintings of themselves. But they're from a very different social class, the patricians of Florence or Venice. This is to set the theme. I love still life, especially if they have food and wine. There's some wine up there. This is Pieter Claesz, C-L-A-E-S-Z, probably

mispronounced. This is still life. They paint food. They paint food, and people eating, and people having fun, not people at war, not the eighteenth-century inevitable paintings of the British nobles or land big gentry looking over all of the villages they've had knocked down so they could expand their hunting terrain, or fondling the nose of their killer hunting dogs, or something like that. It's just a very different way of imagining oneself. It's very attractive. I must admit it's very attractive. This is the village school. They had the highest literacy rate in the world, point, period, the Dutch did. They were very, very ordinary people. There were poor people in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, they were very ordinary literate poor people. There's something to be said for that. I like cats a lot. I hate dogs, but anyway, this is children playing with a cat. My cat yesterday actually undid my Yale password last night. I saw the thing that said password. The next I knew, she had literally typed my password. I had to put a new one. This has nothing to do with anyone, so you should take this out. Anyway, cats. There we go--boules. This is what we do in the South of France with a little chardonnay on the side. We play boules. It's not quite the same thing. That's like bocce. We have this sort of metal ball. That's for another lecture, a n'a rien voir avec These are ordinary people having fun. Here they are. Here they're having fun. But they're having too much fun. This is part of the point. Part of this sort of this inveterate Calvinism, and part of the fact that, "what if the dams burst?" Or what if the British begin to outdo us in the world trade department? Or what if the French come and squish us like grapes? There's always this sense of vulnerability. Behind the paintings of people eating, the theme of people eating or praying prayers at mealtime, and this sort of thing, or playing boules, ptanque, bocce, there is always this sense of the ribald family. That's what this is called by Jan Steen, S-T-E-E-N. If you have too much fun, things will get away from you. These people are all drinking and leaving these poor little children to their own devices. They may be knocking down one or two themselves there, because nobody's paying any attention. You could go too far and then you end up like this. How does it all end up in the long run? How it ends up in the long run for the Dutch is that the Dutch cease to be a great power. But there's nothing wrong with that. They have gone on to live highly prosperous lives. They eventually end up with a monarchy. They eventually lose Belgium in 1831. They basically didn't care. The Dutch economy, the equivalent would be the decline of the Venetian economic power in the Mediterranean--and trade with the East diminishes. The Netherlands ceases to be a great power, whereas Britain in 1707 becomes the biggest of the world powers. But let us still remember these six or seven factors, or whatever I had up

there, and remember what these two places had in common. It has a lot to do with the global trade. It has a lot to do with social structure. It has a lot to do with who they thought they were, the paintings they bought, the paintings they commissioned, the way they viewed themselves. Part of this reconstructing of national identity often has as much to do with who you're not, not absolute, not Catholic, not French, as it does with you who imagine yourself to be. In the growth of national awareness, that itself is an important theme. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 4 Transcript September 15, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Ok, I want to talk about Peter the Great today. The Russian empire is one of those empires that continued, arguably--not arguably, it was the case--after the four empires disappeared with World War I. The Russian empire continues, though it continues under a very different way with what became the Soviet empire. That's what it became. With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the Soviet Empire collapsed, the Soviet Union collapses, and I guess the only remaining empire in the world is that of the United States, which is a more informal empire, but still one that is out there almost everywhere with the military bases everywhere. So, the rise and fall of empires is obviously a theme of this course. The Russian empire, the state of Muscovy had already expanded greatly, but it's really Peter the Great, it's the big guy who expanded Russia, its territorial size enormously. Muscovy had been one of the tributaries of the Mongols, who sacked Kiev in the 1230s, after pouring into Russia and what now is Ukraine. Muscovy was a princely state. It gradually expanded in size, reaching to the Southern Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and emerging as a dynastic state. But yet Muscovy was considerably less important than the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which was considerably much greater and subject to struggles with and influence by that state. What Peter the Great did was he pushed back the neighbors who had blocked the expansion of Muscovy, that is Sweden, who he defeats in a battle worth noting in Poltava, it's in the book, 1709, Poland and the Ottoman Turks. Peter the Great expands territory beyond the Euro mountains along the Caspian Sea at the expense of the Turks. Like all of his successors, he dreamed of conquering the Turkish capital of Constantinople, that is, Istanbul, which would have given him control of the Dardanelles Straits there, the passage between Europe and Asia leading to the Black Sea.

All this stuff really matters, because all these events now with the problems in Georgia. That's a very, very delicate, strange situation, where the great power now, the United States, finds itself rather incongruously arguing that Kosovo--which should be, obviously, independent--I remember going to Pec in Kosovo when I was a kid--It's a little hard to argue that Kosovo should be independent and that what was the territorial unit of Serbia should not be respected. I agree with this, Kosovo should be independent. And to argue that Tibet should be free, and I agree with that. Then to turn around and argue that the people in Georgia, who are not Georgians, should not have the same rights that the people in Kosovo have. The whole thing-the presentation in the press is absolutely hypocritical and just bizarre. But the only point of that little diatribe in parentheses was that the Black Sea really does still matter a lot, and that Peter the Great was the first of the Russian czars to dream of this access on to the Black Sea and then finally controlling the Straits of Constantinople. And Catherine the Great--they all like to call themselves "the Great"--She would make this an important part of her policy, but she doesn't get there either. In the nineteenth century, the Russian czars are still trying to get there as well. Peter's new fleet, we'll talk about his new fleet, which he oversaw and, in a very minor way, helped build himself, sails down the Don River in 1698 and takes the Turkish port of Azov, A-Z-O-V, on the Sea of Azov. This gave them access to the Black Sea. But then they're forced to back up. They lose, and they're forced to surrender Azov to the Turks after an unsuccessful war. So, Peter the Great, despite his dramatic expansion of the Russian empire, does not get this outlet on the Black Sea. But what does change, and what the battle represents is, of course, Poltava-is that Russia's participation in European affairs had been totally minimal. There's a story often told, indeed told in the book that you're kind enough to read, that--I think it was Louis XIV's equivalent of minister of foreign affairs--sends a formal letter to a Russian czar--it couldn't have been Louis XIV, but one of those dudes--it might have been--he sends a letter to a czar who had been dead for twelve years. Russia was that far away. It was not in the consciousness of the great powers. But after one of Peter's victories, the Russian ambassador in Vienna reported that the news of Peter's victory, people began to fear the czar as they feared Sweden formerly. It's very difficult for us to imagine a fear of Sweden. But that fear--the last real--Gustavus Adolphus, during the Thirty Years' War, was the last really major Swedish interlude in the continental European affairs, although Poltava doesn't come until 1709, so voil. But what he does is that there's no other European state expanding their empires overseas, in the case of the Spanish and the English, that adds so much territory on land to its empire. Between the

1620s and the 1740s, the land of the Russian empire increases from 2.1 million square miles to 5.9 million square miles. Now, to be sure, in Siberia in the far reaches of the north, North Asia, this empire amounted to little more than a series of trading posts, and it took a very long time for any semblance of Russian authority from Moscow and soon from St. Petersburg, for reasons that we'll see, to reach there. But nonetheless, Peter the Great creates this huge empire that will have, over the long run, an enormous influence in European affairs. Because, after all, European Russia is part of Europe and will have an enormous influence on Asian affairs as well. Witness the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905 that the Russians lose. This is a key moment in the evolution of revolutionary politics in Russia as we shall see a little later on. Now, what about Peter the Great? I used to ask my friend Paul Bushkovitch to come in and give the lecture, and I got so interested in it that I did some reading on my own---Lindsey Hughes and various other people put this together last semester--because he is not a terribly engaging or warm personality in many ways, since he enjoyed watching people being tortured, including his own son; but, he is an interesting person. One of the things he does, and I guess this is one of the things to be put in neon from this lecture, is he opens up Russia, which had no secular influences at all, to western ideas. This is an extraordinarily important and transforming accomplishment of Peter the Great. He emerges from the violent world of Boyars. Boyars are the nobles; the Junkers are the Prussian nobles. Boyars, B-O-Y-A-R, are the Russian nobles and royal politics. Peter was the first child of his father's second wife and thus a potential threat to the ambition of the relatives of the first wife. His mother and her allies among the Boyars, that is the nobles, overthrew the regents in 1689. Peter's rule is from 1682 until his death in 1725. There were no strict rules for the succession of the czar. It's basically just kind of an uncomely family battle royal, in which there were bloody settlings of scores. There was no foreign minister. The Boyars' counsel, that is the counsel of the nobles, literally met in the throne of the palace. It became known as the Duma. Eventually in 1905, Nicholas II will be forced to grant a Duma, an assembly to Russia. Then he withdraws, eliminates basically all of its rights, and then the Duma will come back later on. Peter is one of those cases in European history where one person's personality and interest does make an enormous difference. He is an absolute ruler. He can do what he damn well pleases. He is personally responsible for the reforms, the opening up of Russia to a considerable extent to western European ideas. This is something that he does himself.

As a boy, he was very smart and he was very interested in science. He always wanted to know how things worked. He was fascinated with astrolabes and was interested in sailing. Russia doesn't have a port. He's interested in sailing and learns about sailing on lakes, and ponds, and rivers. It does have a port, but it's frozen all the time. His travels took him into contact with observatories, museums, hospitals, botanical gardens. He's fascinated by gardens. When he goes to Europe on his big sortie, on his big-boy trek through Europe, he goes around and he visits all of these botanical gardens. He sketches things. He's constantly sketching the way things work, the way things are. He had this intellectual curiosity that defied the kind of orthodox religious skepticism about any kind of rational belief. This permeated not only the Russian Orthodox Church, but it permeates the Catholic Church as well. Look what happens to Galileo, who was lucky enough to have been burned at the stake by his friend, the pope. He was interested in math and in geography, and thus in maps and map making. What he does is he takes this archaic state structure in which literally nothing had been written down. It's all just passed down from word to mouth. He transforms Russia into an European absolute monarchy with much in common with Frederick the Great, with Sweden, with Austria, the Austria of the Hapsburgs, with Spain, and with France. He tries not only to copy European absolutism, but to open up Russia to commerce, realizing that trade meant wealth and that wealth meant improvements in the lives of the Russian people. More about that in a while. He makes Russia a military power. Indeed, arguably a modern military power, at least in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century sense, and he injects European culture into Russia. Now, just as an aside, but it's one that we'll come back to particularly in your reading, the tension in Russia between an absolute repugnance for western influence and the constant assertion that Russia's traditional ways of doing things are the right way of doing things, long identified with people who would be called Slavophiles. Their tensions with westernizers would last right through Russian intellectual history in the nineteenth century. I remember when I was a student of one of the biggest classes at the University of Michigan--go blue! I am so sad this weekend--it was Russian intellectual history. We would read the Slavophiles, and we'd read the westernizers, taught by the late scholar of Russia, Arthur Mendel. It was fabulous to read these people as they debated what will happen to Russia, the kind of westernizers and those in between. A lot of them were writing from Paris in the nineteenth century. Some of them were great, great writers. There was this kind of intellectual energy. But it came down to this theme that still is so important, and was already so important, which is, what is Russian that should be kept uniquely Russian and closed to outside influence? And what is Russian that should be modified by being open to non-religious influences that come

from other places? This is not just a uniquely Russian tale, as you can see. What about Peter himself? Somebody figured out that he was at least 6'7". Now, that's just huge. That's tiny in the NBA now. But the guards, the "giants," they were called, who guarded Frederick the Great were giants because they were six feet tall. The average person was about 5'3" or 5'4" in France. Napoleon, who was always considered to be kind of a dwarf, a midget, really wasn't at all. He was just sort of corpulent. He was the average kind of increasingly corpulent. He was the average height of most people in France. Peter the Great was a big guy, 6'7". He had extremely small hands, very small feet, which meant he sort of lurched and stumbled sometimes when he walked, particularly because he drank enormous quantities. He had these odd kind of facial ticks that he couldn't really help at all. We don't have a documentary showing Peter the Great in action, for obvious reasons. But the people that he visited when he was snatching huge roasts off the table at the fancy parties in London commented on these facial ticks that he had that would bend his face. He had a misshapen lower lip and his head sometimes when he was talking would seem convulsed to the right. It would move to the right all the time. He was so much bigger than everybody else, so people really were not taken aback, because this was a time when physical imperfections were commonplace. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing people who nature had given, in many ways, a very bad deal along with crushing poverty. But the fact that Peter was a czar and was rather scary in his temperament, because he had a rather bad temper, too, meant that he could be alarming. He could be scary. His generosity was legend, but so was his cruelty. Several times at public executions in 1698 and 1699, he brushed the executioner away, grabbed the axe and did the dirty work himself, chopping off a head or two. In 1718, he ordered a man kept alive after being horribly tortured, so he could be tortured some more and suffer as long as humanly possible. All officials from the chancelleries that he had created and all of the officers were obliged to attend this torture scene as a way of warning them that, "You'd better not mess around." Remember, this is a time, as we'll see in a while, where the czar was on the road a lot, and distances in the Russian empire are enormous. When he is gone from Moscow and then St. Petersburg, there was always this tendency to have these sort of cabales, to get together and sort of plot. His son has the bad idea of getting involved in this later, as we shall see. Yet there were incidents that his merciful side came through as well. But when it came to treason, he was less likely to be merciful, as the case of Alexis, his ill-fated son would demonstrate. One thing is clear. Peter the Great had an enormous ambivalence about his role and his image as a czar. His second wife was a Latvian peasant maid. This horrified the Boyars, who

thought that this was unbecoming. How can you marry a Latvian to begin with, if you're a Russian and marry somebody who was a commoner? He was capable, and there are a lot of paintings of him dressing up and playing the role of a czar, dressing in fancy clothes. But there are more images of him identified with horribly worn boots with his toes sometimes sneaking through at the end that seemed to reflect his great personal thrift, wearing stockings, it was said, that he darned himself, and a battered hat that he kept on wearing that he had worn at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, complete with a bullet hole that supposedly tore through it, missing his head. He liked the company of ordinary people. This was a constant trait. He identified himself with the Russian people. More about this in a while. He avoided carriages. He liked to walk. He would leave the carriage behind, dismissing carriage drivers who were more well-dressed than he was and his guards. He ignored carefully-crafted seating plans at dinner. He jumped from table to table, eating standing up--he didn't like to sit down very much, his back hurt--or walking around. He couldn't stay still very long. When he was lodged, he liked living in your basic Russian, wooden, peasant house, such as you could find on the outskirts of Moscow. One of the things that's very true about Moscow, right into the twentieth century, is that you had all sorts of peasants living on the edge of Moscow living in these wooden houses. He liked that. He said he slept well in these wooden houses and that probably is because of his very unhappy childhood listening to relatives shouting at each other and plotting to kill each other in the big house. And he never liked Moscow. We'll see more about that in a minute, in part because of its overwhelming religious influence and that's one reason, besides the quest for a port on the sea, why he builds St. Petersburg When traveling abroad, he refused the fancy lodgings that were reserved for such distinguished visitors. In 1717 in Paris, Lindsey Hughes reports, he went to a private house instead of the Louvre palace. The museum had a big palace, which is, as I said before, where the small boy, Louis XIV, lived, and then was burned in 1871. Instead he just went and rented a private house and fell asleep almost immediately. He loved sleeping on ships; he thought that the rocking of the waves rocked him to sleep, so he liked doing that. Legend has him eating peasant food--cabbage soup, porridge, meat with pickled cucumbers, ham and cheese, and kvass, which is a drink that I've actually tasted from fermented black bread. But he was not indifferent to foreign food. Somebody found an order. He ordered 200 bottles of Hermitage wine. Hermitage is a really wonderful and now just horribly overpriced wine from the Drme, on the left bank of the Rhone not very far away from where we live. But it's

totally out of price. But Hermitage was a wine that was known by connoisseurs in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and ever since then. For all the talk about eating cabbage and eating with ordinary people, even then Hermitage cost a lot of money. He ordered 200 good bottles of Hermitage wine. So, voil. I wish I had been invited to these things. He was very informal. There is this legend that he used to grab these huge chunks of meat and started gnawing on them like he would on a hotdog or something like that at a Yankee game, except that other people were already dressed up and the meat and the gravy was flying over them as he just sort of walked around gnawing on this stuff. Sofia Charlotte of Brandenburg--I don't know who the hell that is, but it's got to be some royal hanger-on--wrote that "It is evident that he has not been taught how to eat properly." But she liked his natural manner and informality. King Frederick of Denmark found him ill-mannered and inappropriate. He liked to masquerade. Again, this is his personal ambivalence about his own role, hanging around with ordinary people, sleeping in peasant lodgings and that sort of thing. He liked to dress up as a sailor. One thing that he always did when he went on his grand tour is he always took fake names, as if he was signing into a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. He would take the name of a commoner. He didn't sign into a hotel as Peter the Great or whatever, but he would go in with a name that wasn't his. Again, this is just his personal ambivalence about who he was, and his uncertainty about the role that he had in his own family. So, this was a play-acting that was part of his life. These ornate masquerades and charades that are part of his complexity reveal something about his identity. Then when you see these portraits of him, he looks very czar-like. He looks like one of these royal people that were painted all the time. In 1697 he goes west with the name of Peter Michaeloff. Even in his own account books, which he kept very carefully about how much money he spent. He wasn't radin, he wasn't a cheapskate. But he paid attention to royal expenses, personal expenses. He refers to himself with a variety of names and titles, as captain this, colonel that, general that. He's not trying to hide his identity to the future. It was very obvious who he was. His handwriting is recognized by experts. But role-playing takes on dimensions of the state. I mentioned, I don't remember in what context, the other day that the most famous example is the drunken assembly. It's sort of a mock parallel government with his buddies. It has personnel who are his buddies, those in favor, lots of eating, drinking, et cetera. It has its statutes, sort of the mock constitution, and its rituals that involve basically getting wasted. Again, this is part of his split personality about who he was. If Hughes is correct, this is part of him saying that being a czar is more than just dressing up, and playing the role, and going

to fancy dances, and hanging around with fancy people who don't do a damn thing. You have to do the work. You have to walk the walk. That he did. You had to manifest strength, and firmness, and bravery, and worthy deeds that would be recognized as being real deeds by contemporaries. He constantly warns his son, who was kind of an n'er do well, that, "You better work hard," or, "You better work a little harder and pay more attention to what you're doing. You'd better care about military things more than you do. This is what I'm telling you you'd better do. You'd better listen to what I'm doing." But sometimes he would drink a lot and eat a lot because he just needed to relax. Being a czar was a busy job. He got up at 4:00 in the morning. He was at his office before anybody else was. People began, like in any business, to be attentive to whether or not they were early enough. "Does he see me that I am still here when it's getting dark?" Of course, it gets dark in the winter in St. Petersburg about noon. But anyway, he loved practical things. He loved firefighting, for example. He had a passion for fireworks, explosives, cannon fire. He played the drums. He loved dancing and he loved religious singing. He loved the choir music of Russian Orthodox services. He loved to play chess and he loved to play billiards. And, as I already said, he loved mathematical instruments and telescopes. He carried a telescope with him wherever he went. He knew how to use it and he knew what he was looking for. He loved globes. He loved to see where things were. He liked to see that they mapped parts of Siberia that people didn't know what was there. It was rather like parts of Africa before the 1880s. You see these big blanks, because nobody had ever been there. He was interested in that. He was self-taught. You didn't have to go to some fancy school if you were a czar, to be a czar in training. You had tutors, as all these folks did. He made spelling mistakes, which you can see. I don't read Russian, but he made spelling mistakes when he wrote. His handwriting was awful. Bad handwriting is the nemesis of historians, to be sure. But he built a private library, and it wasn't just full of religious books. It was practical books about fortifications, hydraulics, artillery, navigation, and shipbuilding. But he also sang religious music. He had many religious books, the kind of standard liturgical texts that were the stuff of religious enthusiasm, and more modern theological works in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Another point about this sort of ambivalence about being czar is that he often made a point of choosing his most trusted advisors from the ranks of commoners and gave them the right to become titled after a certain amount of time in the royal bureaucracy. But sometimes he had a tendency to pick people whom he liked a lot but were totally unqualified, military commanders who weren't very good. But what he does is he cuts off Russian absolutism from

this totally religious culture that represented 100 percent of the official culture, in a real sense the culture of pre-Petrian, that is pre-Peter, Russia. Russian culture was entirely religious. If you went to Poland, where I go often, as I've said before, if you went to Krakow, where Copernicus worked--I've been in Copernicus' workroom, and it's absolutely fantastic-in Krakow you had a major university. It was an important center of learning, a diffusion of scientific ideas in the scientific revolution and later of Enlightenment ideals. In Vilnius, which is the capital of Lithuania, you had a university as well. But there wasn't a university in Russia. There was no equivalent of the Royal Society that you're reading about in London that was very important in the diffusion of the scientific revolution. There's nothing like the Acadmie des sciences, the Academy of Sciences in Paris, which was founded in 1666. There's no legal tradition, so there's no law school. There's no medical school. There's no secular culture. Ninety-percent of all the books that were published before Peter were devotional texts in the church. There was no word literally in Russian for the state, or for the monarchy, or for the government. They did not exist. The state was an abstraction, but in the person of the czar it was a reality. Now, the Boyars, in the 1660s and the 1670s, some of them began to learn Latin and Polish. Diplomacy is still in Latin until the end of the seventeenth century and then, as you know, it becomes French. So, what about his accomplishments, besides the ones I've already mentioned, to which I will return in a little bit. Muscovy had already conquered the Volga basin in the sixteenth century, where the nomadic Tatars were, T-A-T-A-R-S. This is important, because it's the black earth region of rich agriculture there. What happens in Russia is what happens in Prussia, as well, and in other parts of Eastern Europe, particularly in the Hapsburg domains--you have, to make a very bad pun, a resurfacing of the region by people forced into serf contracts. Not contracts. They become legally part of the land, literally. This follows the arrival of the expansion of serfdom. Serfdom expands along with the Russian empire. They already held Siberia and they reached the Pacific Ocean in the 1640s. So, I already said what the number of square miles that were increased, but it increases from six to sixteen million of the population. They expand north to Archangel, so this gives them a port, but a frozen one. And, as I already said, south and southeast to the expense of the Turks. But Peter wanted a navy. It's sort of circular reasoning. If you want to have a navy, you have to have a port. And if you're going to have a port, then you have to have a navy. Why not? He first built a navy on rivers using Dutch shipmasters from Amsterdam.

He once said that if he wasn't the czar of all the Russians, what he would want to be would be an English admiral. He learned Dutch--and Dutch is a very difficult language--in 1696, while the Turkish war went on, or one of them, he went off to Western Europe incognito as an embassy soldier. Again, it was part of his gamesmanship, his pretend games. There he learned carpentry in a very serious way. He went to the Leiden Medical School, because he wanted to see how you dissected bodies. He went there, too. Then he went to London, along the Thames, the major port of the world then, along with Amsterdam. He learned shipbuilding there as well. Because the building of ships was, to him, the application of rationality, of reason, thinking, and experimentation, this got him interested in the scientific revolution. There's nothing too surprising about that. The essence of the scientific revolution. He may have even attended a Quaker meeting, but we're not sure about that. The problem was if you have a basically landlocked power and want to get to the sea, then you'd better have a navy. He'd learned to sail when he was young, but on the river. This also, by the way, gets him interested in Baroque and these kinds of Baroque masquerades that he had back in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg as well. So, in all of this, what he does is he makes, to use an expression that I've already used before in the context of absolutism, he makes the Boyars, while he's building his navy and expanding Russia, he makes the Boyar junior partners in absolutism. That phrase again. Now, there are only about 200-300 Boyar families. They own, by the way, 40,000 serfs, own 40,000 serfs, just these 200 to 300 families. They build huge houses in the seventeenth century in Moscow with very old-fashioned traditional Russian architecture. The Russian empire was rather like Charlemagne's empire in 800 in the coronation at Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle and all of that. You have this bureaucracy that's--it's not really a bureaucracy, but you've got these royal officials representing the royal will, but the actual impact in this vast expanse of the Russian empire isn't that great. There's nobody telling people what to do on a day-to-day or even a month-to-month basis. Yet there's an enhanced sense of obligation to the czar of all the Russian people. There's an advanced sense of state and of organization. That also is one of the things to put in neon. He creates committees of advisors that, in many ways, are not that different than the kinds of ministries that would evolve in western absolute rulers--absolute states, and in nonabsolute states as well. By 1708 and 1709 he has created a more European-style administration for this vast empire. He wants to build a capital city. That's where St. Petersburg comes from. It had been Swedish territory, and his victories give him this land. I

once went to visit the summer palace that he created and that Nicholas II loved so much there. He constructs this new capital. What's important about the construction of St. Petersburg--I don't know how many of you have ever been there; I haven't been there for a very, very long time--this city is not like Moscow at all. When you look at Moscow you see these old traditional, the skyline is dominated by churches, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. St. Petersburg is completely different. It is an example of classic great power, absolute urban planning. It has a long boulevard, the Nevski Prospect, very important in 1917. The most dominant buildings are not churches; they are state buildings. They are state structures. It's a different place. It reminds you of Madrid. It reminds you of Berlin. It reminds you of Versailles and it reminds you of the post-Haussman Paris, that is, post 1850s and 1860 Paris. It is an example of what I call the imperialism of the straight line, where you have large boulevards that you can march armies down to, reviewing stands and all of that, totally different than Moscow. The religious leaders did not like Peter, because Peter is bringing in to Russian culture foreign elements. They were already suspicious of the implementation or the annexation of Baroque religious forms, architectural forms and liturgical influences from Austria and from Central Europe, and now they've got a guy who's telling the Boyars' women to dress like western European women. At a time when beards meant a great deal religiously, he's telling the men to shave off their beards. He's telling the men to wield forks and knives as well as weapons, and to adopt non-Russian customs, to bring them into Russia. There's tremendous tension with the church. But he remains--he is a true believer, but he is bringing into Russian religious culture changes that were deeply resented. Some aristocrats began to put on western style wigs, such as you could find at the court of Versailles. Women had to wear high heels and they were tottering along and falling on the cobblestones wearing high heels and European style dresses. He promulgates decrees as czar about daily life. This is a big transformation. As to his son, his son was more under the influence of these traditional religious influences. He is plotting against his own father. Peter, on one of his trips, has to return back to Russia. In 1716 and 1718 Alexis had taken his mother's side in the divorce and did not like the Latvian peasant second wife. He also didn't like military service. He was lazy. His father said, "I see you are spending more of your time in idleness than in taking care of business at this crucial time." But Alexis doesn't get the point. He begins to plot in various ways with dissident Boyars. He goes off and gets the support of the emperor of Austria to wage a war against his own father. Terrible idea. When he returns, his father orders him tortured.

Under torture, Alexis--who probably dies of cold, not of torture, in a very frozen cell-- named Boyar accomplices. These people are toast, obviously. The son probably died of TB, but it related to all this other business in his weakened state. That was the end of the son. But what lasted longer than Alexis was the Europeanization of Russian culture. Peter the Great has books translated from the west, including John Locke, into Russian. This, itself, was a remarkable accomplishment. After all, the Russian Orthodox churchmen had not been interested in the Renaissance at all, not interested in the scientific revolution at all; and, by 1710, Russian students are being sent abroad to foreign universities, particularly in Italy, but also in France and in England. They're studying practical things like marble work, and metal work, and copper work, and not just shipbuilding. They're also studying the life of the mind. In a way, it's possible to argue, which is what I'm arguing and I'm not the first to do it, but Peter the Great was, in many ways, himself a child of European rationalism, of a scientific culture of rationality and of, at least in the earlier stages, the Enlightenment. He was not against the church, but he thought that people were wasting time being monks, and other people were all over the place in their Russian Orthodox equivalent. He believed whatever one wag once set of monks, "I sleep, I eat, I digest," and they prayed, of course. To him this was not useless, because it didn't serve the state. It didn't serve the dynastic interests of the dynasty, which he identified with the Russian people. He did not ever imagine the abandonment of the table of ranks, which set everybody in a hierarchy, not for a minute--we're talking about the end of the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. But he believed that it was important to take the tools of science, to take the tools of rational thought and apply them to the good of the state, even if you saw that good of the state as in ships that could lob cannonballs even further against hostile ships, and that kind of thing. But he founds the first Russian museum, the first school of navigation, the first school of this and that. There are 100 times more books, pamphlets, prints, and maps produced in Russia under the time of Peter the Great than there had been in the whole previous century. Peter, as Lindsey Hughes has argued, was highly suspicious of any alternative to state service, especially the monastic way of life, which I've already said. But he thought that it should be channeled through state obligations, be there taxes or labor duties. At the same time, he's equally suspicious of the godless. So, he remained very Russian, but it was the importation of more western ways of looking at things that were very important. He wrote once that, "The chief thing is to know your duties and our edicts by heart and not put off things until

tomorrow," like his son did. "For how can a state government exist if edicts are not put into use?" et cetera, et cetera. Their lives should be better. The concept of the state was fundamentally new to Russia, but gradually came into existence, and his accomplishments had a lot to do with that. He wrote his son in 1704, he said, "I may die tomorrow, but be sure that you have little pleasure if you fail to follow my example. You must love everything that contributes to the glory and honor of the fatherland. You must love loyal advisors and servants, whether they be foreigners or our own people, and spare no effort to serve the common good." The common good comes right out of enlightened thought. It comes out of Locke and those folks. "If my advice is lost in the wind and you do not do as I wish, I do not recognize you as my son." That, in the end, is what came in the long run. He remained a fanatically Russian patriot, the father of his people. His admiration for foreign things and approaches was tempered by, as Hughes argues, his devotion to Russia, which he oversaw. The common good became a real concept and one that, unfortunately, some of his successors didn't take terribly seriously. In conclusion, he defiantly, deliberately, and effectively broke with tradition. In doing so he made himself sort of an outsider to traditional Russian ways of looking at this thing. This ambivalence that was part of his personal life, the way he lived, would be a constant theme in subsequent Russian and still, in many ways, is today. Between Slavophiles and westernizers, those are the people that look inside Russia to finding what they think to be eternal truth and those people who want to temper such looks with a look to the west. That, in neon, is what Peter the Great did above all and for which he shall most be remembered. Next time to the Enlightenment, and some people whom you might not think of at first glance would seem terribly enlightened. See you on Wednesday.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 5 Transcript September 17, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: This is the beginning of the French part of the course. Today I'm going to talk about the Enlightenment and the cultural concomitants of the French Revolution, and how people began to imagine an alternate sense of sovereignty in the nation. You're in for a treat on Monday, because I have one of the only bootlegged copies of the live speech and then the execution of Louis XVI. I'm going to play that and also the death of Citizen Marat in the bathtub at the hands of Charlotte Corday. That will be on Monday. Then I'll talk about-inevitably, though I don't particularly like him--Napoleon on Wednesday. The next three times are about la belle France, but because the Revolution is terribly important and, indeed, in lots of ways in many places--it's well worth doing. So, I'm going to do four things today. I'm going to first talk about your basic outline of what difference the Enlightenment made, followed by--with reference to my good friend Bob Darnton's work, The Social History of Ideas--and look at surprising ways that Enlightenment influence was felt. I'm not talking about the big-time people like Rousseau and Voltaire, but the Grub Street hacks. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about the public sphere, taking two examples. One from the work of David Bell and one from the work of Sarah Maza, in which you can see this emergence of this possibly different way of viewing sovereignty residing in the nation and not in a king. Then look again at what difference, in a very strange way, the Enlightenment made in all of this. First, the kind of classic stuff, just to review for you. If you had to summarize six ways that the Enlightenment mattered, you might list them like this. First of all, without question, Enlightenment thought--although the Enlightenment thinkers disagreed on many things, and a few were atheists, but not many, most were Deists and believed that God was everywhere-the Enlightenment did weaken the hold of traditional religion, particularly the role of the

Catholic Church as a public institution in France. Of course, if you read in high-school French or wherever Candide, which is blatantly antireligious, of Voltaire, you'll see the most extreme example of that. Secondly, and related to this, Enlightenment thinkers taught a secular code of ethics, one that was divorced from religious beliefs. That they were engaged with humanity. They loved humanity. They thought people were basically good, and this shouldn't be just a valley of tears awaiting eternal life, and went out to make such claims. Third is that they developed a critical spirit of analysis not to accept routine tradition. Truths that were passed down from generation to generation, particularly those passed down by the religious establishment and--not to accept routine tradition, such, for example, routine hierarchies. This was part of their spirit of analysis. Fourth, they were curious about history and believed in progress. They were convinced that France had a special role to play in this. To be sure, the Enlightenment was to be found in many places in Europe, and in what became the United States. Paris particularly played a central role in that. Fifth, that they differentiated absolutism from despotism. In order to understand what happens in this remarkable series of events in 1789 and in subsequent years, as I said before, there weren't ten people in France who considered themselves republicans, that is who wanted a republic in 1789 and how it was that two or three years later, in 1793 it became easy for the majority of the population to imagine a life without any king at all. Sixth--and here's the role of the Grub Street hacks, of the third division of Enlightenment thinkers that I'll talk about in just a few minutes--they heaped abuse against what they considered to be unearned, unjustified privilege, and--how can one put this--disrespected the monarchy and the nobles who hung around the king. One can say in hindsight, because we know what happened next, that the Enlightenment helped prepare the way for the French Revolution and that the French Revolution transferred power, transferred authority to people who were very influenced by the Enlightenment. The classic example which I will give, because I enjoy talking about him so much and he is important, is Maximilian Robespierre, who in many ways was a child of the philosophes. As you know, the philosophes, which is such an important word in French, became a word in English. The philosophes were the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Robespierre, born in Arras in the northern part of France and now what is the Pas de Calais, was very much influenced

by Enlightenment thought. As the twelve of the Committee of Public Safety sat around that big green table making decisions that affected the lives of lots of people in France, Enlightenment influence was certainly there. The Enlightenment stretched across frontiers. I think there's a map in the second edition of the book that you are kindly reading where you can find copies of Diderot's famous encyclopedia. You could find it in South Africa. You could find it in Moscow. You could find it in Philadelphia. You could find it in New York. You could find it in papal Rome. You could find it all over the place. One thing that's interesting is that twenty or thirty years ago, when I was starting out, when people did what they used to call intellectual history, intellectual history was the big ideas. You call it the Via Regia of history, where you've got one idea moving along and it hooks up with another idea, and then a third idea comes as a result of that idea. It's rather like traditional art history where you try to discover where it is that Pizarro got his red ochre as a color, or where such and such a Baroque painter got the idea of painting cherubs in a certain way. In the very early 70s, my colleague, retired a long time, a great historian Peter Gay, coined the phrase "the social history of ideas." Ideas, too, have a history. Who understood Rousseau? Who read Voltaire? Who read the Encyclopedia of Diderot? How do we know how these ideas were used? He called for the social history of ideas. A number of people, including Bob Darnton who is now at Harvard, but taught at Princeton for decades and who turned out the finest historians of old regime France, took this very seriously. So did another friend of mine, Danielle Roche, who did work on the acadmies, which I'll discuss in a while. They began to look at how Enlightenment ideas got around. How did copies of Candide, which was illegal in France, censored. How did these things turn up in France? Let me just say a couple things about this. Enlightenment ideas really came into elite popular opinion, in what we call the public sphere--that is, people who are interested in ideas, and people who became interested in politics--in really three major ways in France. There are equivalents of these in other place. The Scottish example because the Scottish Enlightenment is very important. You can read about it in the book. One of these will be quite clear there. First, through, acadmies. An academy was not a university. It has nothing to do with a university. They still exist. I'm a member of one of these academies, an obscure one in the Ardche. An academy was a group of erudites, sometimes including clergy, many nobles, many bourgeois people of education. The population that was literate increases in Western Europe decidedly in the eighteenth century. They would get together and discuss ideas. They had contests where people who wanted to make a little money would answer a question put out by

the acadmie. They would write responses to questions about science, religion, and big ideas. Robespierre wins one of these contests. These acadmies meet in smaller rooms than this, but they discuss ideas. These ideas are putting in sharp analysis, or re-evaluation, the role of the church as an institution. They have to get around some way. People have to know about them. The academy is one way this happened. A second one, moving to number three, are Masonic lodges. Masonic lodges still exist. There's one, I don't know if it's still active, but there's a big Masonic building out on Whitney on the right. I think it became an insurance building. One of the horrors of my seventh grade life was having to be dragged off to the dancing school in Portland, Oregon, which met in a large building which was a Masonic lodge. Masonic lodges begin in Scotland. They are secularizing institutions that the members mostly all agree, agreed in the eighteenth century, that the church's public institution role is too important. Masonic lodges talk about these ideas as well. They talk about Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and all of these people. This is a second way in which these ideas get out. The third is the salon. There's another French word that's so important it became an English word. A salon was a gathering of pretty elite people, but interested in the life of the mind. They were hosted by hostesses, again, the role of women in the Enlightenment. I give you in the book the example of Madame Geoffrin, which was the classic one. People would come together to eat, to drink, and to discuss ideas. When British guests came to Paris, the salons, they said, "All they do is eat and drink. They spend all their time eating and drinking, and they don't discuss ideas that much." In fact, they did. There's still a wonderful place in Paris called the Palais Royal where you can go, and on very hot days--in the eighteenth century, in the 1770s, you can imagine people meeting there talking about the ideas of young Enlightenment hotshots, those people who have become part of the canon of western civilization. This is another way where these ideas get along. Young, would-be philosophes on the make coming up from the provinces, what they want to do is be introduced to one of these hostesses so that they will be invited to trot out their intellectual wares at one of these gatherings. These are concrete examples of the way that these ideas got around. People didn't pay any attention to this before about thirty, thirty-five years ago. Danielle Roche's book on the acadmies, two huge volumes not translated, are really marvelous in all of that. That's something to keep in mind. The high Enlightenment really ends in 1778, traditionally. That's a textbook kind of date. But it does matter, because that's when Voltaire and his great enemy, Rousseau, both die. After that, there are no more Montesquieus, or Voltaires, or the big-time all stars of the philosophes.

There aren't any more. But there is this next generation of would-be philosophes, people who could think and write and who want to hit the big time. They see that Voltaire made big bucks, big francs, big livre writing. They want to be like him. They want to be like Voltaire. They want to be like Rousseau, his archenemy who paced around his little farm called Les Charmettes in Savoy outside of Chambry, and who hated Voltaire. They really couldn't stand each other. But he also hit the big time. What the Grub Street hacks, Grub Street refers to--I don't know if it's a real street or imaginary street in London where lots of would-be writers and writers who are peddling their wares hung around. These Grub Street hacks, the third division of people who want to have the kind of entry into the salon life to put forth their ideas. They live on the top floor, where the poorest people live. They're dodging their landlords all the time. They don't have enough money to pay. A lot of them live in Paris around now around Odon. It doesn't matter if you know Odon at all, but they live right around that part in the Latin Quarter, but more in what now is the Sixth Arrondissement, and they write. But what do they write about? They need to make money. The big news here, as Darnton discovered, is they write pornography. They write scatological pornography. They write what they call in Frenchlibelles. They write broadsides, really, denouncing the royal family, denouncing the queen above all. Indelibly called "the Austrian whore" by her many detractors, who are omnipresent. They write against what they think is unearned privilege, the kind of censorship that they see is keeping them from hitting the big time. The point of Darnton's many wonderful books is that in the long run, although these people were the Grub Street hacks, Voltaire denigrated them as the canaille, the rabble, the scribblers, jealous, eager, anxious, hungry--is that their attacks on the regime and against the unearned privilege, as they saw it, helps erode belief in the monarchy, and helps suggest that the monarchy itself and the people hanging around the monarchy at Versailles is lapsing into despotism. So, they do make a difference. Let me give you an example. This is sort of a classic one. Imagine you're a bookseller in Poitiers. Poitiers is a very nice town full of lovely old romance churches in central western France. You are writing to Switzerland to order books that you want to sell to people who have ordered books, for example. He writes the following letter: "Here is a short list of philosophical books (books written by the philosophes) that I want to order. Please send the invoice in advance. They include: Venus and the Cloister, or, The Nun in the Nightgown; Christianity Unveiled (that could be the subtitle, too); Memories of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour; Inquiry on the Origins of Oriental Despotism; The System of Nature; Teresa the Philosopher; Margot the Camp Follower.

This is not exactly the stuff of Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and these other people. But yet, those who penned such things imagined that they were philosophes and wanted to have the same kind of impact that Voltaire and the others had. These were la canaille, the kind of rabble of Grub Street. Why was he writing Switzerland to begin with? Again, this is the question of how do these ideas get around? One of the things that the Grub Street hacks didn't like is that you've got censors. You've got paid censors who work for the government who say, "This can't be published" or "Un-uh. You shouldn't have published that baby. That wasn't a good idea." The result is, in a system in which privilege, of which monopolies, of which guilds controlled the production and distribution of almost everything, that book-selling and book-printing are monopolies controlled by the state. So, if you're a Parisian printer, unless you're risking being thrown in the slammer, the slammer (that's not a real word in French, obviously), you can't print this stuff out in Paris. So much of the Enlightenment literature is published in--you'll not be shocked to know--you already know this, Amsterdam, or in Brussels, in the southern Netherlands, or Switzerland. Bob Darnton, when he was a young professor, before that a young graduate student, he hit the jackpot. A lot of the stuff was printed in Switzerland in Neufchatel, and he got hold of the archives of this printing company. He was able to do the social history of ideas. Who bought what? By the way, before the Ryan Air or any of these places, how do you get all of this stuff from Switzerland, where there are big mountains, into France? How do you get it to Poitiers? How do you get it there? Again, you have to look at the way that this stuff is distributed. The ideas, we've already seen how they were distributed, but how literally do you get these books, these bouquins, these pamphlets, these brochures from Switzerland or the equivalent, from Amsterdam or Brussels--that's easier, a flat country is a little different than mountains--into France? Well, in France, as in the German states, as in Italy, there were peddlers. There were peddlers. They would go on the road and they had--like a medicine ball in a gym, they'd have these huge leather bags. They'd be stuffed with all sorts of things--pens and pins and--I think I mentioned this is another context--and religious literature, but also hidden at the bottom, beneath the religious literature, they are smuggling into France Enlightenment literature. They have drop-off points. They go over the Jura Mountains, that's not so easy to do, and they take them to a city like Chaumont in the east, or Metz or Nancy. Then somebody else carries the stuff all the way. Avoiding the police around Paris, the gendarmerie, the marchausses as

they were called then, this stuff, Margot the Camp Follower ends up pleasing this drooling guy in Poitiers, who can buy it from his bookstore. You can really follow not only Diderot's encyclopedia--and how do we know where Diderot's encyclopedia ended up, by the way? Well, for example, people who leave wills, that's how we know about literature in the nineteenth century, because the libraries in estates would be detailed, so we know what books people had. In the eighteenth century we have a tremendous proliferation of ideas, of reading, of literacy, and of ways of discussing these ideas. I've already mentioned three of them there, but if you look at the case of Britain, you've got the coffeehouses. Coffeehouses follow the mania of coffee. Coffee comes from where? The colonies. So, coffeehouses are part of this sort of globalization of the economy, but also the globalization of ideas. This stuff all kind of fits together. Again, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot and the others would be just horrified to think that anybody intellectual would be mentioning some of these Grub Street hacks along with them, because they didn't accept them and nor were they of the same quality at all. Some of these guys, by the way, there's one who I mention in the book, a guy called Brissot, B-R-IS-S-O-T, who becomes an important leader of a faction in the Revolution called the Girondins, from around Bordeaux, who are against the Jacobins. More about that later. Brissot is broke. How is he going to pay the landlord? He has no idea. Where is he going to get his next drink? What does he do? He works for the police. He works as a police informer on the other would-be philosophes, on the Grub Street hacks. How do we know this? Darnton found the dossier in which Brissot is being paid off by these people. What are other ways that we know how many of these characters there were? There were about 200 to 300. I don't remember exactly. Why? Because they want money. On one hand they say, "I don't like this censorship, it's keeping people from recognizing my true genius." On the other hand they write little sniveling letters saying, "I am a writer and a very good one, indeed. Therefore, I merit a state pension." They write these letters to the various equivalents of ministries, saying, "Please give me some money, because I am a really wonderful writer and instead of repressing my work, you should be saluting my genius." They write clammy letters like that, that you find in the archives. We piece this stuff together gradually. Let me just race over here and give you just an example of--where is this stuff?--here we go. What would Voltaire think of this? Here is one of these pamphlets that's denouncing the highlivers out at Versailles. "The public is warned that an epidemic disease is raging among the girls of the opera, that has begun to reach the ladies of the court and that has been communicated to their lackeys. This disease elongates the face, destroys the complexion,

reduces the weight, and causes horrible ravages where it becomes situated. There are ladies without teeth, others without eyebrows, and some are now completely paralyzed." People want to know what it is. It's obviously a venereal disease. He's obviously exaggerating the-who knows? I don't know--but the results of such a malady. What he's doing is he's suggesting that what's really going on at Versailles is lots of people-how do I put this politely?--hooking up all over the place at the petites runions, while they're dressing up as peasants, or whatever, and that the result is very demeaning for the French state and for the French monarchy. So, does this have an effect? It does. It really does. It contributes to what has been called the desacralization of the French monarchy. It is very hard to argue that God has put absolute monarchs on earth to bring people better lives if you've got these people--and ordinary people did not get into Versailles, unless they were among the 15,000 lackeys working there. Lackeys would be the term given by the people who employed them. You didn't know. You had to surmise. You had to guess what was going on. I'll give you a couple of examples in a while, and I'd better hurry up and do this, in which you can kind of see how this works. I'll give you kind of a spectacularly interesting example, at least I think so, at the end. By the way, just as an aside, during the French Revolution Louis XVI decides to get the hell out. He and Marie Antoinette, improbably, dress themselves up as ordinary people. They're not people who have to set the alarm clock usually. They get up at 3:00 in the morning and they get into this large carriage that's been stuffed with silver and foie gras and all sorts of other things. They hightail it toward what is now the Belgian frontier, but they get further and further behind. You can read about this when you get to that chapter. It's an interesting story. Finally, they get recognized. She is not a governess, she is the queen. One of the people that first realizes this is the king has actually caught a glimpse of the king himself by looking through the fence at Versailles at the time of a wedding. He sees the king. There aren't photographs. He recognizes the king's nose. He gets down on his knees and says, "Sire, you are the king." This guy can no longer pretend that he's a mere hanger-on assisting a Russian baroness. It's all over but the shoutin' at that point. What these people do is they helped break down this sense of automatic respect for the monarchy as an institution. Of course, the fact that they can't stand Marie Antoinette who, rightly or wrongly, is accused of all sorts of things. This is racing ahead of the story, but Louis XVI was a big-time cuckolded guy. His wife was seriously sleeping around while he was taking apart and putting back together clocks, which he liked to do in the big house when his wife is out in the bushes, to put it crudely. I forgot

this is being televised. Anyway, take that back. Can you erase that, please? Anyway, what these people do is over the long run this helps erode respect for the monarchy, and helps us explain why it was in 1789 you could imagine a world without a king and a world without a queen. When they bring them back, they bring the old boy and his wife back from Varennes, which is in the northeast of France, the National Guard turns their backs in serious disrespect to the carriage, and they hold their guns upside down. At that point, that's la fin des haricots, the end of the green beans, as the French say, for the king. But this process started earlier. The third-string hacks of the Enlightenment had something to do with it. Let me give you a couple of examples also from other friends, but really good serious work has been done in the last twenty or twenty-five years. Rocketing right along here, let me give you another example of this relationship of the public sphere to imagining a new source of sovereignty, that is the nation, and give you an example of how that works. This comes from the work of David Bell, who is my colleague and still very dear friend who teaches at Johns Hopkins. This is from his work on lawyers in the eighteenth century. We'll give you an example of how this fits together. It fits into the Enlightenment stuff, because if Enlightenment literature was censored and sometimes hard to get hold of, though an encyclopedia was tolerated and then not tolerated and then tolerated again, what Bell's work on lawyers demonstrates is the way in which lawyers and legal briefs help get these ideas around as well. Because you could not censor legal briefs. To give you just an aside, don't worry about this now. In the case of imperial Russia in the late nineteenth century you had big-time censorship by the police. In fact, when there were these political trials, lots of what was said in the courtroom got around as well and couldn't really be censored in the way that ordinary publications could. You had this same sort of effect there. Let me give you a couple examples. They're complicated examples, but don't worry about them. The first would be from this very strange not really heresy, but I guess the Catholic Church considered it a heresy called Jansenism. I remember once coming in to do the equivalent of this lecture and having to look at my own book for a good definition of Jansenism that I must have found once, because it's so obscure. There was a bishop who didn't think he was obscure, but a Belgian bishop called a Jansen who thought that the Catholic Church was becoming too over-mighty, and full of Baroque masses and huge expenses for archbishops who weren't doing a damn thing. He imagined another kind of religion and became very ascetic. Somebody once called them Calvinists who went to mass. They were still Catholic, but they didn't believe in this high Baroque church.

Jansenism was in 1715 or so. Then it comes back in the 1760s or 1770s. It's extremely boring stuff. Louis XIV didn't think it was boring. He sent out the troops to burn down Jansenist abbeys, the big one was called Port-Royal outside of Paris. He thought that this was a threat to the Galician Church, which was sort of the alliance of the Catholic Church with the monarchy in France. Rather like Carthage, they were supposed to plow salt into the land and all this business. So, they wage war on these Jansenist people, who were rather like Calvinists in many ways. But the only point of that is that there are lawyers who begin to defend the Jansenists and begin to see the actions of the king vis- vis this persecuted religious minority as despotic. When lawyers are publishing legal briefs--and there's enough references in the book, so you can put this together, but I just want you to see the point. When they begin to publish legal briefs defending the Jansenists against these kinds of attacks, these are published by thousands of them. They can't be censored. They begin to suggest at a time in the eighteenth century, particularly after mid-century when we can already begin to speak of French nationalism, at least among the elite at the time of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, thus the Seven Years' War. It begins to suggest two things. That monarchies can behave despotically, going beyond the accepted limits of absolute rule, and that the nation, this idea of the nation is being betrayed by bad governments. If this doesn't sound like the French Revolution, then nothing else will. Those are very important defining moments. The same things happen also in the 1760s and 1770s, with various attempts to liberalize the French economy that I describe in the book. The king's attempt to dispense with the parlements, which were really noble law courts that were provincial. You can read about this. But the same thing happens. This is the point. These lawyers begin turning out these legal briefs that imply the same two things: that absolute monarchy is risking stepping over the lines of the acceptable and behaving in a despotic way, and that there is something called the nation in which nobody would have imagined that classes were all equal--the discourse of liberty, fraternity and equality is a hell of a long way away--but that the traditional rights of the nation are being betrayed by the monarchy and that things isn't so good at Versailles. Again, trying to look ahead and see what happens in 1788 and above all, 1789, which is one-I'm not a big guy on dates in history and having to remember all these dates. But 1789, like 1917, that's a big one. That's a big one. But in order to also understand the emergence of a radical republic and the execution of the king, one has to see that the nation becomes invested with a sense of moral quality that makes it not impossible to imagine a world without kings. And, so, lawyers, who are called barristers, play a major role in all of this.

Again, this has to be seen in the context of a century in which more and more people can read. The literacy rate in a country like France is still well below fifty percent, maybe forty or forty-five percent, something like that. More men could read than women. Not only literacy increases among the elite, but the amount of things that are published and the amount of newspapers that are published expands dramatically. A point of reference would be in Britain, you can read about this, the campaign of John Wilkes, who was sort of a rascally character. But Wilkes--and the number forty-five becomes virtually illegal, because forty-five was the number of a newspaper in which Wilkes and his supporters essentially call out the British political system. Again, we're talking mostly about Western Europe, and literacy is much higher in the Netherlands and in Northern France and in Northern Italy and in England than in other places. This is part of this cultural revolution. It's important to see the role of this, because in orthodox Marxist interpretation you had to have the ever-rising bourgeoisie, the rising in the fourteenth century. There they are again in the sixteenth century. They're like some sort of runaway bread or something like that. In the nineteenth century there they are, the bourgeois century. I'll give a lecture on the bourgeoisie, because they do indeed rise. Nonetheless, a kind of class analysis can't be completely thrown out. Classes did exist and people had a sense of themselves as being members of a social class. It was not immutable--these boundaries were more fluid in Britain than in other places, but still are important. But now for the last thirty years, people have paid more attention to the cultural concomitance of revolution and what difference Enlightenment ideas made, and what difference the emergence of a sense of the nation and the infusion of politics with a sense of right and wrong and morality. It's an important part of all this. In the last twelve minutes and thirty seconds that I have today, let me give you another example of this. I think this is a fascinating--it's so fascinating I can't find it. Let me give you an example. This is drawing upon an excellent book by Sarah Maza. It's a very well-known episode, but it shows you and ties together the sense of the nation along with the impact of this sort of third generation of Enlightenment hacks after 1778, to understand their role in the erosion of a sense that the monarchy was immutable in representing the rights of the nation, even if that construct was just coming into being. In this book called--what's it called?--Private Lives and Public Affairs. Maza takes a couple of cause clbres. Cause clbre would be like one of the things that you find in the tabloids in Britain or the U.S. I don't read that stuff, so I really can't give any good examples. But one of these actors and actresses you always see running around, or whoever this person is,

Brittany Spears, or something like that. A singer or actress, I don't know what she does. But anyway, something like that, that people focus their attention on these people. They sort of dominate, if you will--this is almost an insane comparison, but the public sphere in that they're in the news all the time. And, so, what Maza did about the same time that David Bell was working on the role of lawyers in the eighteenth century is that she took a couple of these examples, and shows the way in which private affairs that were kind of sleazy and not too cool--but were sensational-helped bring these threads together and contributed to kind of erode the prestige of the monarchy. This fits into the sense that I've already given you that was extremely pervasive, particularly around Paris is that a lot of things that went on at Versailles weren't so good. The 10,000 nobles who were clustered around Louis XVI and particularly his wife were undermining the authority and the prestige of the monarchy, and that wasn't a good thing. An incident called "The Diamond Necklace Affair" is illustrative and mildly amusing, not more than that. It also involves this Palais Royal place in Paris before. A woman called Jeanne de Saint-Rmy--the name doesn't matter at all--was a poor noble. She claimed descent from the royal family. She had a pretty good education. She had important protectors. She marries an officer of rather dubious noble title, who was called, quite forgettably, the Marquis de la Motte. He met the fifty-year-old cardinal called Louis de Rohan, whose name I should have put on there, R-O-H-A-N. He was from a very famous old family called Rohan Soubise. The national archives used to be and now they're adjacent to it in this fabulous old--why don't they ever have things that work in here? It's just unbelievable. I can't find anything to write with. The family called Rohan Soubise--there's this wonderful, wonderful palace or chateau in the Marais, which is still there. This cardinal is on the make. He's very, very wealthy. He's a cardinal. That's why he's wealthy. Or he's wealthy because he's a cardinal. He thinks he's snubbed the queen. He wants to be one of the people who helped make important decisions, but he thinks he's alienated the queen, that this is standing between him and the power that he thinks he should have. He writes missives to the queen begging her to forgive him. He's met this guy, de la Motte. They begin sending forged replies from the queen that suggest that the queen now is listening, and maybe all is forgiven and it's going to be okay. They have this idea. There's a famous jewel that had 647 flawless gems, worth 1.5 million pounds, which is a whole lot of money in those days and still now. Louis XV had commissioned it for one of his mistresses and then backed down because it was too expensive. In 1788 the necklace was offered to Louis XVI for Marie Antoinette, but he turned

it down, saying the realm needs more ships than it does more jewels, which was reasonable enough. They con this old, fairly horny cardinal into showing up at dusk at the Palais Royal and introducing him to the queen herself, whom I guess he'd met once. But it's dusk and his eyesight isn't that good. What they do is they find this prostitute, of which there were about 25,000 in Paris at any one time, who looks vaguely like Marie Antoinette. This cardinal, de Rohan, thinks that his ship has come in, that everything is going to be okay. This purchase order has been forged, supposedly signed by the queen, and the real jewels are delivered. Then, of course, it's broken up into pieces and sold on the street for zillions of francs, sold on the black market in London and in Paris. But there's a problem here, because the word gets out what has happened. And de Rohan, who has really been made a fool, there's no doubt about it. But it's more serious than that, because that he has done is he could be accused of lse majest, which is the ultimate kind of insult, plotting against the queen by identifying her prostitute as the queen herself. To make a very long story short, the monarchy, humiliated by all of this--the cardinal is saying mass in his fancy robes in some cathedral, probably Saint-Eustache, but I'm not sure. It might have been Notre-Dame. I don't know. Well, Saint-Eustache isn't a cathedral. But anyway, he's in his robes. The police come in and arrest him. What happens then is they put him on trial. He is not a terribly loveable guy or--not someone to be very much admired. By an incredible series--or not an incredible series, but an almost logical playing out of what I've been saying, the lawyers who defend him and the crowds who salute him portray him as a victim of a regime that is crossing the line between absolutism and despotism. He is a cardinal and he becomes the darling of the people. Poor old Jeanne, this noble, she and her boyfriend get branded and sent off to the galleys, et cetera, et cetera, predictably enough. But the parlementof Paris acquits the good cardinal, and he emerges from the palace of justice or the parement --still now on the Ile de-la-Cit, the largest of the then three but now two islands in the Seine in Paris--to popular acclaim, saying that justice and the interests of the nation have been served by his acquittal. What this sleazy, unsavory incident does is it helps continue the desacralization of the French monarchy. Again, lawyers and the people who see themselves as representing the interests of the French nation are, in their own imaginary, and in their own mental construction, and in the eyes of people who follow these events in legal briefs and in newspapers--the guy who's acquitted is seen as somebody who had been done wrong to by a monarchy that has gone too far. That exactly, not much more than a year later, is what is going to play out in the French Revolution itself.

To conclude, Voltaire, de Rohan, Montesquieu, who you've been reading and these folks have big-time impact on the way we look at the world around us. They had an impact on those people who would become the organizers of the revolution and indeed, the leaders of France and their children, their successors in the nineteenth century. But lawyers, part of this culture of increased public sphere that was Western Europe in particular but also parts of the rest of Europe, too, in the eighteenth century, had a role in all of this, and that by 1789, not in any kind of inevitable process, a revolution was not inevitable, but the sense that the monarchy had gone too far and that there was something called the nation out there, was in the public sphere and the results of all of this would be there to see in 1789. Now, have a good weekend and on Monday you're going to hear the execution of the king, the death of Citizen Marat in his bathtub. I hope to make clear why some people supported the revolution and others didn't, and what difference it all made. Have a great weekend. See ya!

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 6 Transcript September 22, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: I'm going to talk about the French Revolution. It's hard to do. I'll leave myself about forty-five minutes after I screw around at the beginning. I want to do two things. I want to see the Revolution through the eyes of Maximilien de Robespierre, a member of the Committee of Public Safety--arguably, with Saint-Just, its most important member. In a way, Jacobin--he incarnated the French Revolution. In doing so I want to talk about the terror and, above all, why it was that people supported or opposed the Revolution. It comes down a great deal to religion, as we'll see. But first, because I promised that we had the only live, bootlegged album of the trial of the king, and of his execution, I thought I'd play those and also the death of Citizen Marat in his bathtub. To do that, I decided to bring a prop. I'm not making light of instant death. I just finished a book about a guy who ends up putting his head in a little window. You knew people were smaller back in those days, but you really didn't imagine that they were this small. Do you know what this is, what this comes from, this guillotine? Do you know what this is for? What? No. This is real. That hurt, actually, when I did that. Don't write your parents, especially you freshman, and say, "he was running here waving a guillotine, running around the place. There he goes again." No, it's for cigars. Student: That was my idea. Professor John Merriman: That was your idea?

Student: Cigars, awesome! Professor John Merriman: No, don't smoke. Anyway, can you put on the first one? This is the trial of the king. This is the king. I'll just translate part of it. I'm not going to translate the whole thing. It doesn't matter if you don't know French. This is just for ambience. This is ambience. They're putting him on trial. He did bad things. I'll translate part in a minute. This takes probably too much time, but it's cool. This is from a rock opera about the French Revolution. Keith Richards live here. Keith Richards? This is too long to get to it. I apologize. Louis XVI, this was his finest moment. This is not Louis XVI. They're going to ask him to respond to the charges, and the old boy will. "Answer the accusation, the indictment, what you've done against the nation." It's nice. Listen. "Among you, I'm looking for judges and all I see is accusers." (I won't do the whole thing.) "I never did this horrible thing. I never betrayed my country" (which is patently false). "Life has given me some misfortunes and death doesn't frighten me at all. Maybe you can do France better than me, take care of France better than I could. Keep it from its own excesses. Take care of my family." (They didn't come out very well either.) "Take care of my children. It's only favor I'll ask you to carry out. Je n'ai plus rien vous dire. I have nothing more to say to you." (They're going to vote now. Got live, got dead.) La mort, death. Saint-Just, "death." Marat-he'll get his in a few minutes. He will get his, too. Now, they execute the old guy. This is the death of Citizen Marat. He meets Charlotte Corday, who is from Normandy and a royalist. He's in his bathtub. I won't translate everything. "Citizen, you're coming without knocking. You're seeing Citizen Marat nude in his bath. What's your name? Charlotte. You have very nice eyes. Come here a little closer. What can I do for you?" (I won't translate that.) "Do you like them, Citizen? Why are you looking so mean all of a sudden? To make you afraid, you bastard. What's the knife for? Argh!" You heard it live. That's it. Okay. Can we get the lights, please? Maximilien Robespierre was born on May 6, 1758 in Arras, a beautiful town destroyed in World War I in the north of France. His father was a lawyer. He was the son and grandson of lawyers. His father married the daughter of a well-to-do brewer and they were married a few months before the birth of Maximilien. Two daughters, one who died, this is fairly normal, and Augustin, his brother, followed. His mother died giving birth to a fifth child who barely survived her. The father was unstable, always leaving home at the time of the birth of all of his children. He finally died in Germany.

So, Robespierre never had a family. Psychohistorians have done a lot with this. The family of four was left in the care of a maternal grandmother and aunts. Essentially, he was an orphan at the age of eight. He felt his father's guilt about causing the death of his wife. His sister remembered after his father left, disappeared, "A total change came about in him, forming like all other children of his age, he was thoughtless and turbulent and flighty. But since he became the family head, so to speak, by virtue of being the eldest, he's become settled, responsible and laborious. He spoke to us with the kind of gravity which impressed us. If he was to take part in our games, it was in order to direct them. He loved us tenderly and there were no attentions and caresses that he did not lavish upon us." Henceforth, if you buy a psychohistorian's interpretation, "He could only be a man of order. He desperately tried to assimilate himself to the social order. He both loved and hated his father as he adored his dead mother. His whole life was marked by feeling of his father's guilt, which also represented the death in a real way of his own childhood." In his last hours, his death wish, his inability to act when he might have saved himself can be seen, if you will, in that context. He was forced into a seriousness and responsibility. He always had a passion for solitude, isolation. He knew what it was to be poor. He was an example of sort of downward mobility. He went to school and he was really smart, supported by charitable foundations, first in Arras and then in Paris. At age eleven to the college or middle school of Louis le Grand, where he became a star classics scholar. He was selected among all the other pupils to read a poem that he had composed to none less than the king and the queen as they passed by Reims, also in the north of France, in champagne country. As it was raining, the king and the queen ordered the driver to go on, not stopping to listen to Robespierre's little poem and, indeed, splashing his only good suit of clothes with mud as they drove off. He became a lawyer, getting his degree in 1780 in Paris, a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris. His scholarship passed, as things did in the old regime, to his younger brother. He entered literary contests that were run by the Acadmie. It was once said that he even caught sight of the great Rousseau, but that seems a little unlikely. But in Metz, the Acadmie awarded him 400 pounds, which was a lot of money. He was elected to the Acadmie of Arras. In law cases he championed the poor, the humble. He took the side of a man in an abbey who had been accused by the monks of a theft, when in fact one of the monks had done the ripping off. He once said when somebody was condemned to death, "I know very well that he is guilty, but I can't imagine to send someone to his own death."

At the beginning, but only in the beginning, he did not believe in capital punishment; although, arguably those who agree with him would say that he saved the Revolution by meting out capital punishment. Because of his reputation--this was a classic case of a young lawyer on the make--he's elected to the Estates General from Artois. He's unknown. When he goes to Paris he's called in the minutes sometimes "Robes-Pierre," sometimes Robespierre. Sometimes Robert, like the name Robert, or sometimes simply Robert, as if that was his first name, and Pierre, his second name. But he began to make a mark, speaking always very softly. Sixty-eight times he spoke in 1789 and he gradually gets his reputation there. He opposes all restrictions on the freedom of the press, and of course that would change later as well. He invokes Rousseau's concept of the general will to support the view that the king should have no right to oppose or delay legislative measures proposed by the assembly. You know this from your reading. He sided on the left of the assembly with those who went to Varennes to bring back Louis XVI when he and Marie Antoinette tried to hightail it to the southern Netherlands or, that is, to Belgium. That was the king, by the way. He should have been there first. That's the king. There's Marat fully clothed. There is Maximilien Robespierre. Although he spoke often, he lacked presence and color. This would be the case until the very end. The English writer, Carlyle, saw him as "anxious, slight, an ineffectual looking man in spectacles, his eyes troubled, careful, with an upturned face. Dimly trying to understand the uncertain future times, but he spoke with an intense passion and conviction, a belief in all that he said." Mirabeau, who died of syphilis, one of the king's main advisors, said of him, "That man will go far, because he believes every single thing that he says." He seemed rigid in his principles, plain, unaffected in his manners. "Nothing," said an Englishman, "of the volatility of a Frenchman in his character." He supported the idea that all male citizens should have the right to vote and thus, he opposed the idea of having active citizens, who pay taxes, and passive citizens, who did not have enough money to pay taxes and thus could not vote. He calls for, among others, the deposition of--the king's being deposed, both in the legal sense and being deposed from the monarchy. He was already known as "the incorruptible." He received letters of admiration. Once leaving the assembly a crowd put oak leaves around him and carried him around the city in triumph. He always wore impeccably white clothes. He wore a powdered wig, which is very much an old regime thing and not a revolutionary thing. He was not somebody who was going to go out and tutoie easily. The revolutionaries tutoient-tutoie is in the familiar form, like du in German, as opposed to Sie. Du is the familiar form.

All were equal, therefore, he didn't say vous to people who were above you in the social ladder. He didn't like people touching him. Indeed, probably he was chaste. He had only a few flimsy and only by mail flirtations with women. When they picked him up, you have to imagine a sort of crassly American analogy, where a football coach who's sort of swept off his feet after a big upset or something. He doesn't like people touching him. He doesn't like being carried away by them. He was ascetic, always preferred being alone. He ate very modestly. One letter to him said, "As incorruptible as you are courageous," and he was that, "you have always openly displayed your feelings. It has never been self interest that has made you act or speak, only the general interest." He identified with ordinary people and he ends up living in western Paris, a more prosperous part of Paris, but in the home of a carpenter on a street called the Faubourg Saint-Honor. Those were really his happiest moments. It provided him with a family. It had young children in it that he really hadn't had--a very normal circumstance. People who came to see him saw him sort of stretched out on the couch with his family trying to guess from the way he looked what he might want. Would he want more grapes? Would he want more milk, et cetera? He read a lot. He wrote his speeches, which were written out by hand. He was always well combed and powdered, the cleanest of dressing gowns, et cetera. He began to be a frequenter of the Jacobin Club. These clubs, like the Feuillants, and the Cordeliers, and the Jacobins, were called that not because they had anything to do with the religious orders, like the Jacobins were a religious order. The biggest places you could meet were churches and abbeys. Those were always the biggest buildings. The Jacobins, who were on the left of these clubs, begin meeting right even before the Bastille falls on the 14 th of July, 1789. He begins to go to the Jacobin Club. The Jacobin become the great leftwing centralizers of the revolution. They trumpet the authority of the Parisian Sans-Culottes. That's another French term so important it worked its way into English dictionaries. The Sans-Culottes were those who supported the Revolution. Technically, if you said sans culottes it meant somebody who was not wearing pants. That's not what it meant. What it meant was not wearing fancy kind of aristocratic breeches, and it became identified with a form of political behavior. You could be an aristocrat, and there were liberal aristocrats, in a meeting in a club called the Club of the Thirty, who helped push the Revolution really toward constitutional monarchy, at least in the beginning. If you were against the Revolution, you were an aristo. You were an aristocrat. If you were for the Revolution, you were part of the people. You chose the color red, because red becomes the color of the leftwing interpretation of the Revolution. You gave people kisses on both sides of the cheeks or three times,

depending on where you were in France, as recognizing the solidarity you had as being a citoyen, that is, a male citizen, or a citoyenne, female citizen. The whole idea of kissing, by the way, is terribly important in France, but that's mostly a latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century thing. People really kept their distance, whereas now if you live in Paris you kiss twice, or in the Sixteenth Arrondissement not at all; you merely shake hands. If you live in the Parisian suburbs, often you kiss four times. If you live in the south of France, you kiss three times. In the Department of the Hrault, which is BasLanguedoc, if you live in Bziers, you kiss three times. If you live in Montpellier, which is a more aristocratic city traditionally, a more formal city--it was a big university town, it really rocks--you kiss only twice. But this idea of kissing people on the cheeks was a sign of revolutionary solidarity. Symbols were very important. If you carried pikes around, pikes at the Battle of Valmy, which you can read about--is the pikes of the Sans-Culottes that stopped the highlyprofessional armies of the enemies of the Revolution. So, he believes in the necessity of a single will. Again, this comes out of Rousseau's idea of the general will to save the revolution against its enemies. He is one of the people that helps push the French Revolution to the left. His principles were totally unshakable. He doesn't budge on them at all. Of course, it's just insane to look back and see in Robespierre the origins of totalitarianism, despite the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre also was a man of his times. He was not against all property. He was against les gros, people having too much unearned property. He thought everybody should have enough to get along, but that even people who didn't have any property and thus didn't pay any taxes, as I said before, ought to have the right to vote. He also, like the Jacobins, believed that they ought to have enough to eat. One of the tensions that one found in French Revolutionary political clubs, and political societies, and in the neighborhood sections that began planning how you would defend your neighborhood against foreign invaders or insurgents from within-the price of bread, of course, counted enormously. In a couple of weeks I'm going to talk about what difference bread made in terms of popular protest. People who believed in the kind of free trade that Turgot had in the 1870s believed that the market ought to determine the price of bread. But there was always a tradition that the price of bread ought to be kept at a reasonable amount, so that everybody ought to have enough to eat. So, the Jacobins, most of them believed in the maximum, "the maximum," which was a maximum on the price of bread. Now, their enemies on the revolutionary left, or

left central, were called the Girondins, which I wrote on the board and a name I sent around on the class server. The Girondins, G-I-R-O-N-D-I-N-S--which is also the name of the Bordeaux soccer team-were from Bordeaux and the department of the Girondin, many of them were. They are merchants. They are free trade people and they also were extremely interested in launching foreign wars to carry liberty, fraternity, and equality abroad. I'm scrambling for this great quote. The Girondins were in love with war. There was this great rhetoric about conquest and carrying "freedom" to other countries. Although one had to be, and many people were, cynical about this, when the French troops poured into the Rhineland, the prostitutes of the Rhineland cities dressed up in red, white, and blue flags to welcome their new clients. Robespierre made a series of speeches against this Brissot, who was the former Grub Street writer that I mentioned before, arguing that France should not go to war. He said that--and more about this in a minute--that the danger to the Revolution did not come from a handful of migrs in Germany, but from within France, from the counter-revolution. That's important. That's worth underlining. Secondly, he argued that launching wars all over the place will merely play into the hands of the king, who at this point was still the king, and the counter revolutionaries, perhaps paving the way for some sort of military dictatorship. How forwardlooking was that? Because that's exactly what they ended up with, of course, with Napoleon. Moreover, he argued that war would separate soldiers from the rest of the people. Indeed, the leve en masse--my guillotine almost fell down--would compromise that, because all citizens become soldiers, et cetera, et cetera. But he said something. This is an amazing little speech that he gave. I'm going to read just a few lines of it. If you think about current politics in this country in the last five years, it may also ring true. Robespierre said, "The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitution. No one loves armed missionaries. The declaration of the rights of man is not a beam of sunlight that shines on all men, and it is not a lightening bolt which strikes every throne at the same time. I am far from claiming that a revolution will not eventually influence the fate of the world, but I say that it will not be today." Amazing! He lost this debate in 1792 and, in fact, his denunciation of plots against the Revolution may have contributed to revolutionary paranoia, which would be acted out in the terror. On the 20th of April, 1792 the Girondins and the king got their wish and war was declared on Austria and French troops crossed into Belgium, that is, the Austria-Netherlands, and the wars went on and on. I want to make a couple points that are pretty important. I'm not going to use

these papers to do this. The threat to the Revolution did not come just from Austria, from Great Britain, from Prussia, from Russia, from the big allies. Robespierre got this right. There are two--and the timing of this you can read about in the chapter and please do--main counterrevolutionary threats to the Revolution. The first, which was not the most important but still is worth mentioning was what has been called the federalist revolt. This was based in cities in which merchants, free traders, played a big role in that. Here is a map of la belle France. Bordeaux we've already talked about. You've got all these wine merchants and all this fancy land and who merchant other things as well. You've got Marseilles. Toulon is not yet the huge port it had become in the nineteenth century. We've got Marseilles. You've got Lyon, then France's second city, first in gastronomy, one could still argue today. Varennes was merely where the king is caught. That's up there. By the way, in 1790, in order to undercut local elites, that is clergy and nobles, and also to impart a more rational organization of the country--it comes right out of the Enlightenment, out of the philosophes--they create dpartements. They name most of them after rivers, though some are named after mountains. They create a capital in each of them. None of this matters, but it's just to tell you what's going on. That's Haute-Vienne, the capital is Limoges. That's the Corrze, the capital is Tulle. Up there is the Creuse, the capital is Guret. This is Rouen in the Seine-Maritime,. This is the Atlantic Pyrenees, the capital is Pau, et cetera, et cetera. The federalist revolt also in Cannes, that's where the aforementioned Charlotte Corday came from, from that part. That's the department of the Calvados, which is also the name of a wonderful apple brandy. The federalist revolt comes in, above all, in Lyon, Cannes, Marseilles, and Toulon. Of course, the revolutionary armies, the armies of ordinary citizens in the republic, what has become the republic, crush them. They crush them like grapes. In Lyon, one of the members of the Committee of Public Safety, who was confined to a wheelchair, a man named Couthon, who you can read about, C-O-U-T-H-O-N, says he's going to plow Lyon under like Carthage; and they do execute people on the Place Bellecour. So, this federalist revolt is against the Jacobins, a Parisian-centered, far-left interpretation of the French Revolution. By the way, there are groups even further to the left. The Jacobins really weren't that far to the left, but there are groups like The Enraged, les Enrags. There's even a guy called Gracchus Babeuf, who believed that property should be abolished. These are just very small groups. Babeuf is guillotined in Vendme, which is south of Paris near the Loire. His trial is a wonderful source, the trial of Gracchus Babeuf, an original source.

Anyway, that's the federalist revolt. But the most important threat to the revolution comes from peasants. It comes from peasants in the west of France, also down where we live, in this part of France, too. That comes later. Basically, what I'm going to talk about for a few minutes is the revolt in the west. It was often said that peasants would never march more than a day away from their fields; but certainly, as Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, and lots of other people have shown, that's not the case at all. The war was fought with a savagery, with a brutality that was simply staggering. There were massacres on both sides. The Vende, which is in dark there, became a department, good old number eighty-five. But it became such a major blood bath, that the entire counter-revolution in the west is often simply called the Vende. I am in history literally because I read a long time ago a book written by my late and muchmissed friend, Charles Tilley, called The Vende , which sought to explain, and did explain, and really hasn't been nuanced very much over the decades, why some people opposed the revolution, taking big-time chances. Other people who didn't live that far away supported the revolution. What he found--he studied an area, it doesn't matter where, but sort of the north of that dark area, actually in the Maine-et-Loire, a different department--but here's another French word that's also English, in

the bocage country, B-O-C-A-G-E. It's the hedgerow country. He found that the people who rose up against the revolution and took big-time chances--the republicans didn't screw around, and there was a lot of horrible brutality. They drowned thousands of clergy in the swirling waters of the Loire River, which is a really dangerous river, by putting them out into the river with holes drilled in the bottom of the boat, which didn't give them a big hope. They killed lots of people on the Il de R, which is up here off La Rochelle. Of course, the forces representing the monarchy, representing the nobles, were, if anything, more brutal. They crucified people, literally. They made them kiss the cross before they beat them to death. It was really a nasty time. Looking at people who rebelled and ones who didn't, one of the things we can say at least about that particular area, but it really rings true, is that areas in which that traditional elite, noble and priest, had not been broken down by the economic and social changes of the eighteenth century. They were physically isolated. These hedges, you see them also in the in the Manche in Normandy. These are huge hedgerows that you literally can't fight your way through and can't really climb over. People tended to marry within their village or within a nearby village. The priests still walked tall. The noble was somebody who they still respected, even though many of the nobles had left. Many of them they still had to pay dues to the nobles. Their only contact with this kind of bourgeois world of economic change was with people who were farming taxes, for example,

whom they hated, people who were putting out work into the countryside who cheated them and said, "I told you I'd give you five sous last time, but there are a lot of women doing that same work. I'm going to give you three and if you don't like that, too bad. I'll walk away and I won't take the cloth work that you've done for me. Too bad for you." Or people that collected the taxes for the nobles. If you look up further along the Loire River where you had this sort of economic change in the eighteenth century, people accepted this new lead. They were willing to ditch the idea of the monarch. It wasn't that they all read Rousseau instead of the Bible before they went to bed, but these were big-time changes that reflected the way things had evolved. Let me give you some more examples. One of the most important moments of the French Revolution--and this is also worth remembering, and you can read about it--is the civil constitution of the French clergy. The revolutionaries get the very good idea that you're broke. We already know that. The monarchy is just flat broke, so where are you going to get the money? Who has money? Well, nobles who leave France have money, because they have a lot of property, particularly in areas like Brittany and in Burgundy and in Ile-de-France, around Paris. But the church has enormous amounts of money, enormous amounts of land. What they do is they essentially nationalize the church, the details you can get, and they force people to take an oath to the French Revolution, to the nation. In certain parts of France, particularly those that rose up against the Revolution, the priests don't take the oath. They refuse to. They are called nonjuring, that is, non-swearing, priests, J-U-R-I-N-G. In other parts of France, the priests were more willing to take the oath and they were called juring clergy. This is important. If you just look at this map, you see this is by cantons, cantons within departments. You can see all that white up in Brittany and those revolutionary areas. It corresponds exactly to the area of people who fought against the French Revolution. Because the clergy still has enormous influence, and so do the nobles, even if they're living in England at the moment, or living in Britain, or living in the Austrian Southern Netherlands, or in the Rhineland or somewhere else in the German states. But this isn't enough. That's not enough. We have to see really what--here we go. This is by district. This is an even better map of it. You see that in the central part of France here, priests refused to swear allegiance, as in our village, to the French Revolution. But in Brittany and in Normandy they did, massively. And in Alsace and Lorraine they did, massively. And in the north of France they did, massively. So, okay, that's fine. That's interesting. So, what's going on here? What's going on? Why does it go like that? It's not just that people all start getting together and say, "Let's not swear to the

Revolution. Let's go have a drink of Calvados instead." More important changes are going on. The word "dechristianization," which I also sent around, has two meanings. One is the campaign against the church by the revolutionaries to melt down church bells, et cetera, et cetera. Dechristianization, to change the calendar so that it's no longer January, February, March, but it's Germinal, Thermidor, Ventse, names that have to do with winds and plants and the agricultural calendar. That's part of dechristianization, but that's not the big issue. The issue is that in these areas in which the Revolution was accepted, that old time religion was on the rope. A friend of mine, who was a great historian, called Michel Vovelle, a long time ago did a book on dechristianization. He looked at part of Provence. He looked at what people did with their money and wills. He looked at the number of people that became priests or nuns. He looked at all sorts of things--how many people baptized their children within the three days you were supposed to in the Catholic Church. What he found is that the church, it wasn't the Revolution that destroyed the role of the church or that reduced the role in ordinary people's lives. That had already happened. It began after the counter-reformation, that is, the Catholic reformation. It was already well underway by the 1730s and the 1740s. So, you can see political behavior here reflecting these big-time, important trends. Another way, you could look at bishops' sermons. You look at how people named their children. In the nineteenth century when they stop naming their children after local saints, for example. That's another good indication. Or, you don't have many people named Mary Magdeleine anymore in France, or that kind of thing, or in the Limousin named Marcel or Lonard. These are names of local saints. Here again, the areas that were counter-revolutionary, particularly up in Brittany and Poitou and those regions there, the big story was these major kinds of change. Ultimately, what I'm saying is that religion was very likely to be--arguably the most important cause for people supporting or opposing the Revolution, particularly the radical revolution as the Committee of Public Safety sat around this big table and made big decisions. What about the terror itself? The interpretations of the terror basically have gone like this. One, it was sort of a bloodletting by the very poor of their social betters. Well, that's pretty much nonsense. Secondly, that it's a reflex action to save the republic. That makes more sense, basically, and somebody in the 1930s, before there was really quantitative history, went to look. A guy called Donald Greer said, "Let's look at the victims of the terror." What he finds fits into where we started, which is Maximilien Robespierre and his attempt to save the Revolution. Most people in the terror, there was a higher percentage of clergy and nobles executed, because there were small percentages of clergy and particularly nobles in the French population. But the vast majority of people that either were given a prison sentence, or

put their heads through the little window, or were shot down, executed as in Lyon, were peasants and were artisans. Why? Because there were more peasants and artisans, above all peasants, in France than any other social group. That's good to know that, but even more important, that the incidents of the terror in the French Revolution come in areas that are battle zones. They reflect the war, the professional soldiers of monarchies fighting in the north of France or fighting in the east of France. They reflect the civil war. A lot of people were put to death or executed because they were fighting or participating in supplying troops in battle zones. It's possible, as my friend David Bell has argued, to say that parts of this represent the first total war. I'll talk more about that when we get to Napoleon. That's an interesting subject. Anyway, the terror was no sort of organized bloodletting or spontaneous--it was that, too, despite the horrible incidences, despite Nantes, and despite the massacres in the prisons, and the September massacres in Paris. There was a logic to this and it had to do with trying to save the Revolution. Back to Robespierre--fumbling through his papers here to get to the appropriate point--they tried to kill Robespierre, of course, as the terror gets more organized. He had a tendency, as does Saint-Just and the other ones that say, "If we just have one more terror, one more round of terror, we'll finally save the Revolution and all will be well." Lots of people in the assembly looked around, reasonably enough, and said, "We might be the next victims." He became increasingly tired, fatigued. He was never a dramatic speaker, but it was as if he no longer wanted to be heard. Two attempts on his life. It finally got him to come to the Jacobin Club and to go the convention. It's possible to argue that death and revolutionary immortality was something that he chose because of his own childhood guilt, primal guilt, about his own father and the death of his mother. For someone who is ascetic and withdrawn and preferred to be alone, he became increasingly that way, unable to act. In 1794 in the month of Thermidor, he became increasingly obsessed with his own end, his own demise. He says, "If providence is seen fit to snatch me from the hands of the assassins, it was to ensure that I would profitably employ the moments that still remain to me." Yet he could only, as people howled at him from every conceivable angle in the convention, murmur almost inarticulately. When he mounts the rostrum on the 8th of Thermidor, he gives an incredibly clumsy speech for Robespierre. "I need to unburden my heart. Everyone is in a league against me and against those who hold the same principles that I hold. What friend of the nation would wish to serve the nation when he no longer is allowed to serve it? Why

remain in an order of things in which intrigue eternally triumphs over truth? How may one bear the torture of seeing this horrible succession of traitors?" Perhaps he thought that his own death would rouse the patriots, that is the Sans-Culottes in the sections, in the neighborhoods of particularly central and eastern Paris. Eleven times he is shouted down, people shouting, "Down with the tyrant." He says only, "I ask for death." He leaves with his brother and with Couthon and they go to the town hall, the same building is not there, but it's in the same spot. They wait upstairs. Occasionally somebody would say to him, "Why don't we go out and rouse up the sections? We are at great risk here." And they just sit there. They sit in this room. They sit there all night. Finally, inevitably the troops of the conspiracy run up the stairs. Couthon tries to escape in his wheelchair and the wheelchair bounces along with him down the stairs. Robespierre either takes a pistol and shoots himself in the jaw or is shot in the jaw. He spends time trying to rub the blood, because he had this thing about clean, white clothes. Until they know what to do with him, at one point he's laying on a table and he points, with Saint-Just, they point to the declaration of the rights of man and of citizen. They said, "We did that." And indeed, they did. They find themselves taken to the Conciergerie, that is the prison of the Conciergerie, which is still there. It's no longer a prison. It's one of the three great gothic halls in France, along with Avignon and Mont Saint-Michel. Of course, the trial is, as he would have had it for the enemies of the Revolution, is quick with no defense really permitted. The next morning they clip his hair back, as one did, so that the long hair would not in any way slow the blade of the guillotine. They take him, put him in a wagon, and it takes, because there were not major thoroughfares through Paris. They take him to the Place de la Revolution, which is now called the Place la Concorde and they pass him by his house, the house of the carpenters where he stayed, where he had his happiest moments. As he gets closer to the Place de la Revolution, where he's going to meet Sanson--the executioners are all--it's a blood trade, after all. Rather like butchers, they all intermarry. They lived outside the walls of cities. He's going to meet Sanson. As he gets there, he surely noticed that the women were more and more well-dressed and so were the men. As he gets there, they're shrieking at him obscene terms, "Down with the maximum," the maximum on the price of bread. It's a very different crowd. Thousands of people came to hear, to lean forward to catch the last words, to see the head held above, as they did with Louis XVI and with Marie Antoinette. "Hold my head up. It's a good one," said Danton--or something like that, when they'd executed him on Saint-Just and Robespierre's orders before.

He meets Sanson with blood pouring out of the bandage holding his jaw and having come loose. Even at the end, even as they shove his head into the little window, blood is pouring from him. One doesn't know--we can't imagine as he looked up as his head is down. He looks up and he sees the throngs who have paid a fine price to sit on the roofs, like living across from Wrigley Field or something like that, to see the death of the tyrant-tyrant, or the person who saved the Revolution, or one of them. It's very hard to say. It depends on your view. But certainly, one can imagine that Robespierre breathed a breath of relaxation, of leaving an existence that had tortured him and of gaining for the Revolution--he hoped--revolutionary immortality, but also perhaps, one can argue, paying a debt, a debt to his family that stemmed from the death of his own mother long before in Arras. See you on Wednesday. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 7 Transcript September 24, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Okay, I'm going to talk about Napoleon today. It was about maybe ten years ago, before the French Open, the tennis tournament that BNP puts on every late spring. They took one of the American players, a female player, on a quick limousine tour of Paris for a full day. At the end a French host asked her, "What did you like best about the tour of Paris?" She said, "The best thing was the tomb of the little dead dude." I couldn't make that out. Napoleon continues to fascinate, though not necessarily me. The coverage in what you're reading is straightforward, so today I'm going to talk about a couple themes. First of all, what remained Corsican about Napoleon? Then maybe discuss a question raised by David Bell of late. Was the Revolutionary period, and particularly Napoleon, the first total war, in the sense that twentieth-century folks--and at least you were born in the twentieth century--have come to understand? In the end--not ramble a bit, but just talk about what the most important contributions of Napoleon were. Somebody counted up, not me, that by 1980 there had been at least 220,000 books and articles published on Napoleon in a variety of languages. Three recent books, if you're Napoleon buffs or simply want to read about him, that are quite good in English are my old friend Steven Englund's book, Napoleon: a Political History, which came out three or four years ago and was recently translated into French. Phillip Dwyer's book on Napoleon up to 1799--Phillip Dwyer hates Napoleon, but it's a pretty interesting look at the early career. Finally, I suppose most controversially, David Bell's book, The First Total War, which I'll discuss some of the themes in a while. It was only about six or seven years ago, I remember this, they discovered in Lithuania a whole bunch of dead

bones. Well, bones are dead, I guess, if they've been there for 200 years, or whatever. But not of a gravesite, because they were never properly buried, but a place where expired in the snows of 1812 a good number of soldiers of Napoleon's Grande Arme, the grand army; and, so, 1812 still goes on. There is a book, also an interesting book if you're looking for paper topics, that I sometimes assign in the French course called Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier. By the time of 1812, the majority of the Grande Arme were really people who had been conscripted or impounded, if you will, in various allied states. But it's a quite interesting account of what it was like in Napoleon's armies as he invaded further and further into Eastern Europe. By the way, I just did a subject search on Napoleon once. I don't know why. But, of the 220,000 books, you probably will want to not read the tantalizing 1894 classic Napoleon and the Fair Sex, or Napoleon and His Women Friends, which was from 1927, Napoleon in Love, 1959. There are lots of those, and Napoleon Seen by a Canadian, published in 1937. I talk a lot about Napoleon's life in the textbook, but let's look at the theme of Napoleon and Corsica. I once took a whole flock of Yale alumni to see Napoleon's house in Ajaccio, where he was born on the 15th of August. He wrote in a letter to the Corsican patriot with whom he subsequently broke, Paoli, he wrote on the 12th of June 1789, "I was born when the French were vomited upon our coasts," that is the coast of Corsica, "drowning in the throne of liberty and torrents of blood. Such was the odious spectacle that first met my eyes. The cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, tears of despair surrounded my cradle at my birth." Corsica, as I'm sure you know, is an island, a big island. It's north of Sardinia, which belongs to Italy. He, at first gloried in his Corsican origins, hating the French who had conquered his island. Of course, the French Revolution would change all that. That's why it's a good idea to look at him, as you look at Robespierre and others, and see what difference the French Revolution made. Between 1785--and here I'm drawing on Dwyer--and 1795, that is between the age of 16 and 26, he wrote a number of notes, and sketches, and short stories that reveal much about his attachment to Corsica, but also that suggest the dramatic nature of the change as he embraces the Revolution and France. He spoke Corsican and not French. French was his second language. Corsican is a language. It's a patois that is more closely tied to a patois or dialect of northern Italy. In fact, when you drive around Corsica, most of the radio stations that you can get are Italian and not French. He learned French and he made errors. Even at the end of his life he made errors in French, though he wrote French very well. He was bilingual, but he never lost his accent. One of the

things about northern French people, in particular, is that they're less likely to forgive southern accents. Of course, one of the stereotypes of Corsicans is they all become policemen in Paris. Many of them have an "i" at the end of their last names. They have a very strong southern French accent. It's not really a Toulouse accent or our part of France, an Ardche accent, where you can always tell. Those of you who know French--and again, if you don't know French it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference--but somebody who says "quatre-vaigne" instead of quatre-vingt, or "Cassaigne" instead of the great human rights advocate Ren Cassin, or "vigne," a glass of wine, moi, je prends un verre de vigne, instead of vin. It's a famous story about Napoleon when he goes off to military school as a very young boy that they made fun of his accent. More about that in a while. But anyway, at the beginning he hated the French and espoused the fact that he was a Corsican. He felt culturally marginal and this was compounded by his personal loneliness. When he was assigned to Valence, which could make anyone sort of mildly depressed, Valence on the Rhone River, he contemplated suicide quite seriously. He spent a lot of time reading and sort of hanging out by himself and through much of his early days he lacked friends. In 1768, Corsica, which had been part of the Republic of Genoa, that is the port city of Genoa, en face, just across the sea, gave up Corsica to France or, really, sold it. The French state actively worked to try to create a loyal Corsican nobility, and thus, the family of Napoleon, the Bonapartes, B-O-N-A-P-A-R-T-E-S, who had a "u" that he subsequently took out of his name in the first four letters, were ennobled in 1771 by the French. But all nobles aren't rich, as you know. He was sort of what you'd call in French un hobereau, a poor noble. Four of Carlo--that is his dad--Bonaparte's eight children received scholarships to study in France, including Napoleon, who was sent to a place called Brienne, in the north of France. Fifty of the 110 students in this school were called "royal scholars." Here again, here's kind of a comparison to that case of downward mobility--Robespierre, who is also a scholarship guy. There was nothing wrong with that at all, except that there were a lot of fancy noble offspring there, too, who had another reason to mock Napoleon. He wrote in Valance, when he was posted to Valance, again on the Rhone River about an hour now by car south of Lyon. He wrote that life was a burden, "because there's no pleasure. It is nothing but pain. It is a burden because the men and women with whom I live and probably will always have to live have customs that are as far from mine as the light of the moon is different from the light of the sun." But yet there was French influence in his life. He read the philosophes. He read Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and in 1791, again, I don't

want to push this comparison because he was different in many ways than Robespierre, but like Robespierre he enters an essay contest sponsored by an acadmie, in this case the Acadmie of Lyon. His writings mostly reflect an obsession with his origins. I haven't read a lot of his early writings, but Phillip Dwyer has. One of his colleagues in school drew a cartoon of Napoleon rushing to Corsica to aid the Corsican rebel Paoli. He must have discussed this with his friend. And he also battled with those he saw as his rivals. A long time ago, in the 1920s I guess it was, the producer Abel Gance produced this three-and-a-half hour film, which actually is extremely boring, called Napoleon, without sound. But the most famous scene in it arguably is a snowball fight, where Napoleon takes a snowball fight to a more serious dimension, and tries out tactics, and all of this. In a way, he's fighting for his independence and the status as a non-French Corsican, but who has been washed up on the shores of France by a fortune, good or bad. At that point he wasn't really too sure what it was. He began to write a history of Corsica less than 100 pages, which he took seriously enough to begin to revise in the early 1790s after the French Revolution. In it, according to Phillip Dwyer, he portrays Corsicans as courageous, even heroic in throwing off the rule of Genoa and battling the French. "For over twenty-four centuries," he wrote, "the same scenes have been repeated without interruption, the same vicissitudes, the same misfortunes, but also the same courage, the same resolution, the same audacity." But his letters and his writings reveal the folks that he was reading, that is, the influence of thephilosophes portraying Corsica seeking liberty in the shadow of oppression, in opposition to royal authority. So, he links the themes of the philosophes in defense of Corsica's fight for freedom. Even in the 1790s, if this interpretation is correct, he did not see his identity as both Corsican and French, but rather as Corsican. But by 1799, when he with the help of the wily Abb Sieys comes to power on the 18th of Brumaire, the French identity had overwhelmed his Corsican identity. The question is, did he merely catch the nearest way? Is it opportunism? Or was it his belief that the French Revolution and la belle France offered liberating possibilities for humanity? In a short story that he wrote in the summer of 1789, a rather important summer, the French were portrayed as tyrants, still--in his story called the Nouvelle Corse or the New Corsica. He used violence, and his life would be one characterized by violence, as a way of increasing sympathy for the Corsican people. Also it was a cultural expression of Corsican vengeance. Corsica, because of--this isn't just a stereotype, but because of the sort of flashing knives of clan and family rivalries, there were so many crimes in Corsica in the nineteenth century that

the island of Corsica, which became a department, now it's two, but one of the departments of France, had to be excluded when somebody was doing a study of crime. There are so many more crimes in Corsica. In fact, still their tradition of flashing knives--and the Corsican independence movement still places bombs--there are various independence movements--and blows up a lotissement, a housing development being built for Parisian or Marseilles lawyers, or something like that. There are still these kinds of resentments. In the beginning he's still identified with Paoli, but he would break with Paoli. Paoli, the Corsican patriot, was sort of seen as the George Washington of his island. Napoleon was constructing a vision of what he thought he could become--that is, to help liberate Corsica from French rule. How ironic! His father, Carlo, had in his own view, that is Napoleon's view, betrayed the Corsican cause by going over to the French. In a way, you could argue that he's rebelling against his father, at least in the early stages. But the Revolution did bring a change, obviously. It transformed the relations between France and Corsica. In 1789 there were four deputies elected to the Estates General, and in 1790 Corsica is recognized as a dpartement, a department. Corsicans demanded a royal decree that would recognize the island as an integral part of France subject to the laws of France, and declared that those who had fought against France ought to be permitted to return to their homeland. On the 27th of December there were celebrations in all Corsican churches. Napoleon had a banner hung in his not inconsiderable house in Ajaccio, in the family house. " Viva la nation, viva Paoli, viva Mirabeau," who had supported the decree. "Long live the nation. Long live Paoli. Long live Mirabeau." He's trying to play it both ways. He wrote, "From now on we," that is Corsica and France, "have the same interests, the same concerns. The sea no longer separates us." Indeed, that's hardly the case. Even today, in Corsica, there have to be subventions to help keep the cost of food down in Corsica because of the enormous cost of transporting things that are not produced locally. You can't just live on goat cheese and things like that, and red wine produced in Corsica. The sea does matter. But the Revolution helped Napoleon reconcile some of the contradictions that had bothered him all the way along. At this point, he'd become a French Corsican. He renounced publishing some of his letters and began to enter these political struggles in the Revolution. Indeed, he was lucky. One of the amazing things about Napoleon was his luck. When he might have well been guillotined as being a Jacobin, he was in Corsica or in the South of France. He always seemed to be in the right place. This was true in his battles, as well. He was a tremendously courageous guy. His bodyguards are always trying to get him to move back in the traditional

way as an officer, a commander, which he was--thecommander from the battles. He, in fact, is only wounded very lightly two or three times. So he's pretty lucky. When bodies are falling and horses are falling all around him, he remained an extremely lucky guy. This also accounts for his success, although even though on the 18th of Brumaire in 1799, clearly it would be a military person who was going to put an end to what has been indelicately called the War of the Chamber Pots that was the Directory, that is the period of the post-Thermidor, the Directory, the battles between left and right. The Revolution made military men extraordinarily important. There wasn't a king anymore, and the War of the Chamber Pots and the sort of sleaziness of the period, though it was important in giving France some sort of parliamentary experience in a meaningful way, meant that some military person was going to be imposing "order." When Abbe Sieys, who would survive what is the Third Estate, who had also survived all of the vicissitudes of the Revolution, when he thinks about one general, another military man says, "There's your man. There's Napoleon," who is again in the right place. "He's going to do a better coup d'etat than the other guy could have done." So, Napoleon there happened to be a lucky fellow as well. In 1793 the followers of Paoli broke with the convention during the federalist revolts, which you know about. During the expulsion of the Girondins from the convention, the uprisings come in Leon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulon, et cetera, et cetera. Those on the outs with Paoli, including Napoleon, now embrace the Jacobin cause. The Corsican assembly in Ajaccio--by the way, it's A-J-A-C-C-I-O--condemn the Bonapartes, who had dropped the "u" in their name, that's in the book, as having been born in the mud of despotism. So, Napoleon turned his back on the independence movement to which he had pledged in the privacy of his room in Valence and other places, in Brienne, fidelity. He now hated Paoli, who he blamed for having turned so many Corsicans against France. Again, is this opportunism? Had he merely caught the nearest way? He had embraced the national identity of being French and he did take ideas seriously. It's possible to argue, I would believe this, that thephilosophes eventually won out and he saw the Revolution as a liberating experience for France and the construction of a new way of imagining the state. Of course, he turns that into out and out political repression in his own country and the megalomaniac conquest of all of these other places. When he married Josephine, who once somebody said would have drunk gold out of the skull of any of her lovers, he made sure that the French spelling on the marriage certificate was there and that the Corsican "u" had been taken out of his name.

On the island of Saint Helena in the middle of nowhere, where he had a lot of time to think, he wrote, "I am more champagnois," that's where the town of Brienne was, his military school, Reims, pernay Champagne, and all these good things. "I am more champagnois than Corsican, because from the age of nine I was raised in Brienne. It would have displeased the French if I'd surrounded myself with Corsicans. On the contrary, I wanted absolutely to be French. Of the all the insults I have had heaped upon me in so many pamphlets, the one to which I was most sensitive was that of being Corsican." Napoleon was an inveterate liar, particularly when he was trying to craft, it was quite clear he was already ill, his legacy. Much of what he wrote on the island talking about his eternal devotion to the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality, was trying to plan these 220,000 articles and books that would be written about him until 1980. This was a sheer invention of the past, because the record is quite clear in his writings and what he said that he considered himself Corsican. Yet, the Frenchness of the Revolution overwhelmed that in him. In the end, he remained a Frenchman, like very many people with a strong accent, in his case, that of Corsica. There are some other obvious things that are Corsican about him that remained. Again, this is part of the stereotype. In France, like other countries, one has stereotypes about different regions. In France people think, for example, that those from the center of France, from Auvergne, are cheap, radin in French. Or that people in Marseilles exaggerate. You say to somebody in French, "You're from Marseilles, aren't you?" after they just said that they caught a 1,000 pound perch, or something like that, or that Marseilles had just scored the goal of the century. There's a tendency of people from Marseilles to exaggerate. These sort of regional stereotypes are part of any country. One of the stereotypes, though there's some truth with this, is the idea of family loyalty. Most people are loyal to their families, but Napoleon took the kind of clan identity a bit strong. Of course, what he does is he perches his various brothers on the thrones of almost everywhere, this kind of family loyalty. It's not just people from Corsica who might, given that situation, do the same thing. Also there's the settling of scores. Napoleon, and we'll talk about this in a while, if you do believe that the period is--we can see the origins of total war there. I'm a little skeptical about this. Nonetheless, when people turned against Napoleon or against the French armies, his reaction was "We're going to pay them back and we're going to get them." Not with flashing knives, but with execution, burning of villages in Palestine, more about this later, in the south of Italy, and in the Tyrol, in the mountains of Austria.

Whether vengeance is more of a Corsican thing than a champagnois thing or a lyonnais thing or Briton thing or a North German thing or a Polish thing or whatever, one can't say. Yet lots of the thinking about Napoleon looks for things that remain Corsican about him. Having said all of that, what shall we do? Let's now turn to this question of whether we think--and it's just a rhetorical question--whether my dear friend, David Bell, is right that you can see the origins of total war in this period. One thing that I'm a little skeptical about is that if you compare this to the Thirty Years' War--and you saw those ghoulish illustrations before of different ways you could perish at the hands of enemies determined for no particular reason, in many cases, to simply destroy you--it's not clear that the Revolutionary period and the Napoleonic wars really was the first. Yet, if we think aloud, and that's what I'm doing, if we see the origins of total war in World War I, where the mobilization of state resources, as much as possible to the war, and again in World War II--and particularly in World War II the breaking down of the differentiation between civilians and non-civilians. That happens a little bit in 1914, but not that much. It happens in the Turkish massacres of the Armenians in 1895 and 1915. That happens, too. But it is possible to argue that the Revolutionary and particularly the Napoleonic period--from that point of view, the mobilization of--melting church bells and transforming almost every available industrial site into war production, and turning out all these cannonballs, and all these rifles, and all these swords, and all these bayonets, with the total resources of the state directed toward war. There is a point there. There's really two sides of that argument. That's one, the mobilization of resources. The leve en masse, a mass military conscription that all male citizens are going to be in the army. This starts with the French Revolution. After all, Valmy was the battle near the windmill in Chalon, near Champagne in the east of France, the Sans-Culottes going to war--was the leve en masse where ordinary people are full of enthusiasm in singing patriotic songs or heading off to fight the enemy. But the other side of this total war story is, of course, what happens to the civilian population? Napoleon once said in one of his rare moments of real introspection that he didn't give a damn if a million people died because of him. He believed--part of his great failing is--a great weakness, and the suffering of humanity because of it was his sense that no matter what he did, it was the right thing to do. He has this sort of hallucination moment in about 1796 after one of his battles, I think it's Arcole, where he sees after himself--he sees himself transported in the air and that the whole world seemed to be like you're taking off in an airplane. The whole world is beneath him. At that point, he has this sort of sense that what he would will as a human being would inevitably

become reality because he willed it. The other half of this sort of total war aspect is that, to be sure, not only did something like one of every French male born, who would have been eligible for military service, died during the Revolution and Napoleonic wars. But this sort of meting out of a brutal vengeance, more than just in a Corsican sense to people who crossed his will does anticipate in some ways, and I'm not even sure how much I believe this, but the twentieth century. On one hand is the difference between soldiers and civilians--is being eliminated with the end of the really just professional army of the eighteenth century. It's possible there were a lot of people killed in the eighteenth century, too, in those professional army wars and all that business. But victims, too, are not just military people. Of course, the worst atrocities committed by French troops were in this sort of madcap Egyptian, Middle-Eastern adventure when he goes off with a boat packed with scientists as well as munitions and lots to eat. He goes off to Egypt. Imagine conquering India. He had an idea how far India was away. Of course, when people don't put up with this, then he massacres them in Palestine. They raze villages and that's the end of that. As I said before, the examples before would be in Calabria in the south of Italy when there are persistent rebellions, resistance to French rule--and why not?--then they just start massacring people. Of course, the famous case of Spain where you have forever on these magnificent canvases of Goya where French troops are shooting down Spanish peasants who are resisting in the Peninsular War. These too, I guess by more modern definitions, not contemporary ones necessarily from that period, but would be classified as massacres. It's possible and this isn't too far fetched to imagine the sort of total war as being part of that experience. From 1792 to 1815, the experience of ordinary people in much of Europe was war. There is that, too. Napoleon's reaction to all of that was, "je m'en fous." He didn't really care. After every big defeat the next step was to plan the next war. The most famous example, of course, is when you've got hundreds of thousands of people that are picked off by Russians partisans--and why not?--or freeze to death in the Russian winter. When Napoleon, with his ragtag band of survivors, when they get back to France one can see why that French expression, "to lie like a military bulletin," comes into existence. The military bulletin that church people had to read, the priest had to read at mass, said that the emperor's health had never been better. Of course, that was true enough. He immediately begins to start planning another war. When Cossacks are camped on Montmartre and start the first Russian restaurant in Paris in 1814 and he's packed off to the island of Elba, not too far from the Italian coast--he makes his 100 days escape and lands at

Frjus in the south of France. Marshal Ney famously throws himself into his arms after having been sent to arrest him. Napoleon is immediately planning the next war and that ends happily for the rest of Europe at Waterloo, when Napoleon typically does not delegate enough authority, and Marshal Grouchy does not come to rescue him, and he's rounded up and sent so far away. It's a little difficult to plan the next European war if the closest port is some 600 miles away and is in Peru or someplace like that. I made this part of what I'm saying today in kind of a rhetorical way. I'm posing a question, because I don't really have a good answer to that. I don't believe that history runs on railroad tracks and all you need is the timetable to see when modern times show up. But if you look at the horrors of the twentieth century and the butchery of the civilians, in 1895 the Armenian massacre or the butchery of civilians after the Paris Commune of 1871, it's not too hard to see all of this. We're not yet talking about the Holocaust. We're not yet talking about World War II. But yet, some of that was out there. One more point is that, and I'm obviously not defending the French soldiers. It's very unusual for me not to be defending la France and all things French, but nonetheless, one of the cases that you might say total war comes before Napoleon, and this is of course the Vende, which I alluded to the other day, the civil war in the West. There you had cases of them simply razing villages, and lining people up against the wall, and gunning down priests, and drowning nuns, and this extremely asocial, antisocial behavior. One of the things about these civil wars, and the case was true in Spain, was that from the point of view of soldiers in a guerilla war, anyone was a potential assailant. Again, and this is not excusing what French troops did in the Vende, but to have made it a big political issue, which people did in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution and say it's the first genocide, which is what the far right was saying--the traditional far right, not Le Pen and those folks who would be happy to massacre almost anybody who they didn't view as French--it's just sheer nonsense. It's simply not the case. There are some contexts that should be provided in thinking about that. But it's an interesting theme and it's worth discussing. When you're doing this reading, which I hope you'll do, that's not a bad idea to think about. Let me just make a few points. We have about ten minutes left. This is just to amplify what you're reading about. Anyone who's ever had to wait in line at a prefecture in France for a driver's license or, in our case, our French identity cards or almost anything else will be cursing Napoleon for having maintained this sort of centralization that emerged out of absolutism and was honed in defense of the republic by folks like the Committee of Public Safety--where Napoleon

founded a rational, "enlightened way" of organizing a state. Certainly Napoleon--whether he snatched the crown out of the pope's hand and crowned himself or let the pope crown him is not the issue. Napoleon could have pretty much done whatever he wanted, but in fact what he does is he maintains the departments. They were created in 1790. They send a prefect, who is like the intendant but even more centralized, to each department in 1800. They keep the same kind of top down centralized organization. Somebody once said that Gaul was divided up into three parts. When thinking about France at the time of Napoleon or anytime afterward one could think the same thing, that France was divided up into the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of War. Napoleon, who ruthlessly censored newspapers, and forced them out of business, and made the costs of their continuation so extremely difficult, while organizing or orchestrating the cult of Napoleon, whether it be through paid art, some of them extremely great artists, or lesser versions--he maintains the kind of centralization that became important in France and in places where the waves of French troops, "liberty, fraternity, equality," and all of that ended up, that is maintained. He liked to think that the Napoleonic code was his greatest contribution. He wanted to be the modern Justinian. In fact, he does oversee lots of the beatings of lawyers, and jurists, and specialists. It's classic looking back from our view. It's patently ridiculous that there were many, many more times articles dealing with the sale of cattle than there were of the rights of women. This isn't too surprising, because Napoleon--as many dictators, including much more egregious ones like Mussolini and Hitler in the twentieth century--viewed women as nothing more than machines for producing babies. He said this. He said this exactly like that. Yet, and that's a big yet, the Napoleonic code survives and remains in many cases the basis for the French legal system. Again, this is an Enlightenment enterprise in many ways gone right. It is there. Among the other contributions, we don't really have time to talk about it and it's obvious about this sort of nationalism and that one's value comes from service to the state as opposed from royal blood, though he creates this new nobility based upon service to the state. Service to the state was above all through the army. A lot of these people who become marshals and all of this, if they were lucky enough to survive all these ridiculous wars, are military types. The Napoleonic code and this new sort of service nobility are important things. The concordat--he does a very important thing. He makes peace with the Catholic Church. He realized that as long as you had this potential contrast between juring priests and nonjuring priests, that you would still have lots of militant Catholics who wanted some sort of royalist restoration.

Indeed, remember the king was dead and his son had died also in prison in Paris. But you've still got the king's brother out there. It's a very shrewd move. Of course, he uses the church for his own propaganda devices, and the church continues the tradition of really the civil constitution of the French clergy, the relationship between the church and the Napoleonic regime. This is a very important, clever step that basically ends the turmoil within France, at least to that extent. The old revolutionary calendar of Germinal, and Ventose, and Thermidor, that all disappears and was replaced by the basic calendar. People still in 1795 and 1796 in rural France are not thinking of ten day units called decadi, something like that. They're thinking of weeks and they still are having mass said secretly, which was the case in our village, even in 1794, until finally the priest has to go away. The concordat, this peace with the churches is obviously a very important thing. So is, really, the establishment of the basis of the French educational system that's remained, for better or for worse, the same until today. I'm a big believer in the French educational system. My kids were in French schools for three or four years. There's no higher good result of humanity's collective good deeds than a French kindergarten or first or second grade. It begins to fall apart by the time you get to lyce. He created the lyce, the high schools--and the university system is now in total chaos, and Sarkozy will probably make it even worse if he gets his way about creating an American-like hierarchy of institutions, which would be at the expense of not the lower level, but the more modest universities in the French system. But be that as it may, Napoleon--it may or may not be true that he once said he could look at his watch and see what everybody is studying at any given moment. And there are lots of problems with the French system, but the division of France into acadmies, again this has nothing to do with the academies I've been talking about before, but into a geographic way of organizing all education, from the universities down to kindergarten or even to crches, nursery schools, organized by region. It has lasted through all this time. It really is an extraordinary accomplishment. An acadmie, for example, now would be the acadmie of Limoges, or the acadmie of Grenoble, or the acadmie of Marseilles, or the acadmie of Strasbourg. It covers two, three, or four, depending on the region, departments. It's almost impossible to get a schoolteacher fired, by the way. That's another thing. I shouldn't go into--it would be very indiscreet to go into this too much, but if you try to get a school teacher in a village fired, it has to go through the head of the whole acadmie, who is called the recteur orrectrice, madame la lectrice or monsieur le lector. It's very impossible. There are problems with that, but nonetheless, the reason that--and here this sounds like a very pro-French thing to say--but the reason the French children, as Finnish children, and

children in most European countries test at a very much higher level than those in the United States at any level you can imagine is because they have a centralized education system which does not believe that you should have wealthy communes, wealthy parts of France having all of the advantages, and then schools that have very limited financial resources have not the same possibilities for exceptional advancement. France has the grands coles, the big-time, high-powered elite schools, elite universities. They've got their equivalents of the fancy places of which you're all in one now. But nonetheless, Napoleon does create a system which is long lasting and which allowed, over time, the educational structure of France to advance in very, very meaningful ways in the whole course of the period. So, no matter what you think about the fact that in the end he was a megalomaniac and lots of people get killed because of him. There's no doubt about that. But the wave of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period has long lasting results almost everywhere. Take, for example, the unification of Italy. Italy will become unified in the 1860s and early 1870s, "unified." Metternich said it was a geographic expression only, and to an extent he may have been correct. The unification comes through Piedmont Sardinia, which was the most prosperous part of Italy. It's in the north. They had the benefits of this French bureaucracy, of this administration that was centralized that allow them to be more prosperous than other parts of Italy. It contributes to that. They had other advantages, too. So, the Napoleonic wave did make a difference. Though it's hard when you to go Paris--and if you go to the Louvre, it's hard to not think of the fact that many of the treasures that are there were simply looted from Italy, loaded not in trains as Goering, and Goebbels, and those folks looted art treasures during World War II, but put very carefully-packed on military wagons and returned to Paris. So, we can debate about Napoleon and all of that. My view is already probably fairly clear, but one has to admit that besides just the romance of his life, and a career open to talent, and all of that, that he made a huge difference and thus was worth spending some time on. Have a good weekend. I'm going to St. Louis.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 8 Transcript September 29, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today I want to talk about the Industrial Revolution from a variety of aspects. Everything on the board I put on our website, so don't worry about copying it down. It's all pretty obvious. Doing the Industrial Revolution across the century is no easy task, but we will do it and do the reading. Let me just say that the way people look at what used to be called Industrial Revolution, and I guess some people still call it that, has changed dramatically. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the idea of the Industrial Revolution was that it was the work of some genius inventors who created machines used primarily in the textile industry--but also in mining--that eliminated blocks to assembly line production. Then everybody was crowded into factories and the new brave world opened up. In fact, one of the most interesting books and great classics that is still in print was written by an economic historian at Harvard who's still around called David Landes. It's a good book called The Unbound Prometheus, which was basically that. Some of the inventions that I briefly describe in your reading, the spinning jenny, etc., refer to that. That kind of analysis led one to concentrate on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, and to view industrialization as being a situation of winners and losers (by not going as fast). In your reading I give you some pretty obvious examples of reasons for the Industrial Revolution first coming to England: the location of resources, particularly coal; a country in which nowhere is more than seventy-five miles away from the sea; precocious canals and roads; banking systems; fluidity between classes and a very large and increasingly larger proletariat; agricultural revolution, etc.

With that kind of analysis, those places that didn't industrialize as fast, for example, France, one thought they were "retarded"; a word that was used, unfortunately, at that time. Then one tried to see why not. That analysis has been rejected greatly over the past years, because the Industrial Revolution is measured by more than simply large factories with industrial workers and the number of machines. This is the point of the beginning of this. The more that we look at the Industrial Revolution, the more we see that the Industrial Revolution was first and foremost an intensification of forms of production, of kinds of production that were already there. Thus, we spend more time looking at the intensification of artisanal production, craft production, domestic industry--which we've already mentioned, that is, people, mostly women but also men and children, too, working in the countryside. The rapid rise of industrial production was very much tied to traditional forms of production. In Paris, for example, in 1870, the average unit of production had only slightly more than seven people in it. So, if you only look for big factories and lots of machines, you'll be missing the boat on the Industrial Revolution. To be sure, when we think of the Industrial Revolution we think of Manchester, which grew from a very small town into this enormous city full of what Engels called "the satanic mills" of industrial production. Or you think of smoky Sheffield, also in Northern England. Or you think of Birmingham in the midlands. If you think of France you'll think of Lille and its two burgeoning towns around it, Tourcoing and Roubaix. Or you think of Saint Etienne, which was kind of France's Manchester. In Germany you think of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. In Italy you think of Turin and Milan. In Russia, you think of the Moscow and St. Petersburg region. In Spain, Barcelona. Indeed, those are classic cases of industrial concentration, where you do have really significant mechanization over a very long period of time. You do have large towns with smoky factories full of workers. But again, and we've underestimated--in fact, the second edition has more about this than the first, which you're reading--the degree of industrial production in the late Russian empire. Yet, to be sure, when I say that the Industrial Revolution is first and foremost an intensification of forms of industries that already existed, if you were a parachutist and you're somehow floating down over Europe from, say, the middle of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century, what you would see is that there were still all sorts of industry, a rapid increase of industrial production that is out in the countryside, that's not in factories. It's done in a very traditional way. Or rural handicrafts, people producing all sorts of things still at home.

There's a marvelous book written by a scholar called Maxine Berg, who teaches at Warwick in England. The book is called The Age of Manufacture. She reexamined the Industrial Revolution and discovered that, for example, the town of Birmingham, which produced all sorts of toys, big toy manufacturers, that even though you had a lot of factories, you still had a lot of the toys being finished or even produced by women working in the hinterland, that is, the arrire pays, or the environs of Birmingham. If you take smoky Sheffield, a grim kind of place in the nineteenth century, where they produced knives and cutlery. You still had a lot of these products being finished by people out in the countryside. If you take the North of France, if you think of a town like Reims, famous for champagne, it was a big industrial center but it wasn't the center of mechanized production until after about 1850. What you had is you had all these people out in the countryside, mostly women, who are doing spinning and weaving and carding and that kind of thing. Or around Nancy in the east of France. By 1875 you still had something like 75,000 women who were embroiderers working in the countryside. Rural industry intensifies. Finally, at the end--not at the end, but it depends on where you are--you have this implosion of work into factories. So, by the end of the century the kind of traditional view that one would have of the Industrial Revolution has really arrived, where factory production and above all, in the textile industry. The textile industry is the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. You have women who used to work at home that are now working in factories as what the British call textile operatives. Or Switzerland, you think of Switzerland as being the famous mercenaries in the early modern period or the very wealthy bankers in our own day. But if you think of a town like Zurich, on the lake, there was all sorts of industry in the uplands of Zurich, up into the hills and even into the mountains around Zurich, of handicraft production. Or Austria, in the Austria-Hungarian empire, there's hundreds of thousands of people working in the textile industry. The details aren't as important as the fact that, to be sure, the mines that you read about in Germinal, which is a great, great read, and the factories that I will describe in a while are described by Engels--and I couldn't do better than that--are a reality and they become the industrial experience. When you think of Detroit, Michigan, in the 1930s, or Flint, Michigan, in the 1930s, or you think about now the rust belt of Connecticut of Torrington and these places that were once booming industrial towns. That's the kind of classic model. The American model really is closer to what people used to think the Industrial Revolution meant in the case of Europe. But that's not a subject for now.

A couple points--by the way, I don't think I'll ever get to my notes, but it doesn't really matter. First of all, and this is another reason why the Industrial Revolution starts in England. You can't have an industrial revolution without an agricultural revolution. What the Agricultural Revolution does is increases the amount of food produced that's going to feed your burgeoning proletariat, your labor force. This is a place, all of Europe increases in population. The French population is unique; it stops growing in 1846 and 1847. In simply stops, skids to a halt. But everywhere else, the population grows. There are regional differences in France, as there are regional differences everywhere. But the Industrial Revolution depends on the Agricultural Revolution for an increase in food supply. This makes possible the increase in urban population, thus also increasing the demand for food. Also, the Agricultural Revolution particularly, but not just in the case of England, increases capital formation. You've got this sort of surplus of money, bucks, pounds, fric, cash that can be invested in industry. This is precisely what happens. That's why the Agricultural Revolution is absolutely important. These three things, Industrial Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, and the growth of cities, are very much tied together. Let me give you an example, which you certainly don't have to remember. Think of Manchester. I describe the statistics in there, that the growth of Manchester is a prodigious, scary thing. I'll talk more about how rural and urban elites are frightened by the growth of cities, particularly in Germany, but in France, England, and in the United States, later. What the growth of Manchester does is it really changes the countryside around and helps bring the Agricultural Revolution. What do I mean by that? You find the same thing around Paris, around Berlin, or around Warsaw, almost any big city that I can think of. In response to this urban growth, this big octopus of people and money, of rich people and poor people, I'll talk about some of the rich people next time on Wednesday. You've got an expanded demand for food. In that ring immediately around a city like Manchester, you've got a dramatic expansion of people doing what they call truck farming. They're specializing in crops for the urban market--fruit, vegetables, things like that. They specialize because there are people there that are going to pay for and eat what they produce. Take the example of Paris, which I'll come back and talk about with great relish someday. The suburbs of Paris, a place called Montreuil, which is kind of a grim part of eastern Paris. It used to be famous for its cherries, and fruits, and that kind of thing that they were producing for the urban market. Or wine, if you can imagine wine being produced, what a horrible idea, in the region of Paris. It's Asnires, on the Seine. They used to produce wine for Paris's vast market.

Then the next big ring around Manchester, you've got the big fish eating the little fish. They are more productive. As this commercial agriculture develops and more productive production--that's a terrible sentence, there's a greater productivity in response to this urban demand. On the far, distant places you have people specializing in the production of cattle, that is, milk and meat for the market. Of course, the other thing which goes without saying is that in the course of the nineteenth century you've got this amazing development in shipping. Pretty soon with steel, and with refrigeration--and just like now you've got lamb arriving from New Zealand and things like that. This is largely in response to the increase of these large urban conurbations. We use the term "conurbation" to describe cities that grow up so much that they actually merge together. The American Northeast became sort of a conurbation. It's very hard when going to New Jersey to ever see where there aren't cities. One ends and then the other starts. That becomes the case in parts of Northern England as well. The term "protoindustrialization" there is what we mean by the expansion of industrial production along very traditional lines. What I put in parentheses there, domestic or rural industry, we've already talked about. So, first you've got this expansion of industry in the countryside. I'll give you one example. Again, I hate to keep taking examples occasionally from France, but I know that best. The city of Lyons, which is a big soap producing city, what you have in the first half of the nineteenth century is you've got an implosion of work into Lyons, into this working class suburb called the Croix-Rousse--it doesn't matter, although it's a neat place. It's a really neat place. Then in the 1850s the people that owned the silk begin to put work back out into the countryside. Why would they do that? Because the women working there or the men working there worked for less than people living in the city. Again, if you're parachuting down starting about 1750, you have to imagine hundreds of thousands of little dots out in the countryside. And even more of them as the Industrial Revolution gets kicking along before you finally have this implosion or movement in and around cities. More about that when I talk about cities. I'll help explain why European cities are so different than American cities, with the poor living on the outside and the rich living within. Large-scale industrialization has a lot to do with that. Having said all of that, let me talk a little bit about--I'll never get to my notes, but this is fun anyway--women's work. Did the Industrial Revolution change women's work? There are continuities in women's work which are extremely important, and ultimately there will be changes as factory production comes to dominate in many places in industrial Europe. Yet, there are certain things that don't change about women's work and women's roles in the household. Women remain the head of

the family economy. Women, whether they're married or simply living with people that they've been living with for a short or long time, run the family economy and it's true whether they are in rural Switzerland in the uplands of Zurich, working in the textile industry, or whether they are textile operatives in Manchester or someplace like that. The Industrial Revolution does not change other aspects of women's work in that at least well into the nineteenth century in most parts of industrial Europe, women are still working in the countryside but also major employers of women don't change at all with industrialization. The classic case hereto is England, and that is domestic service. If you were going to take England in, say, 1850, the largest three categories of people doing anything are not in this order, but just about all the same number would be women working as domestics. Some men worked as domestics, too. Say, domestic service, textile operatives, and an important category that I'm going to talk about later in my theme of "it's bitter hard to write the history of remainders," rural agricultural laborers, rural proletarians. Another category of women's work, again which one hesitates to evoke, is of course prostitution. The Industrial Revolution doesn't change that sad aspect of women's work. It increases with urban growth the number of people working as prostitutes in even very small towns. The number of prostitutes in Paris or London is simply incalculable. The estimates in Paris go from 20,000 to 100,000. Lots of women who are married become prostitutes pour faire sa fin de mois, to pay off the bills at the end of the month. This sad aspect of women's work, people forced into prostitution by want, doesn't really change with industrialization. The numbers simply get bigger and bigger. Of course, one of the results of this, this isn't the time to discuss this, but there's a sort of panic at the end of the nineteenth century about syphilis and about venereal disease and all that. Also which ironically helps further condemn ordinary people in elite minds, which is a coincidence, since many of the patrons or many of the clients of prostitutes were middle-class males no matter what country you're talking about. More about women's work in a while in the context of factories. Here again, history has its history, too. When I grew up, to the extent I ever did, as a student when I was thinking about doing a dissertation, and becoming an historian, and all that stuff, what people studied was-the reason I put it in quotes--"working class consciousness." We were sort of children of the very late or the 1960s or 1970s and everybody wanted to follow the great English historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote a monumental book called The Making of the English Working Class. Everybody wanted to find the making of class-conscious workers in various places. Everybody wanted to study the crowd, as in The Crowd in the French Revolution, my late friend, George Rud's famous book, the crowd here or the crowd there.

The first article I ever published was called "The Crowd in the Affair du Limoges, April 27, 1848." Now I look back sometimes and I think, "Who cares?" But anyway, in the 1980s the move kind of turned away from that and more people started studying the middle class. More about the middle class folk in the nineteenth century and what my friend, Peter Gay, called the bourgeois century next time around. Nonetheless, you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and class remains a fundamental concept. If you're going to understand nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, you have to understand social class, because there's a reality. We live in a country now where people like to think there are no classes. Well, don't get me going on the current economic crisis. I can remember people going down to the Ford plant in Ypsilanti and Detroit and trying to get people who work in those places interested in the war, against the war in Vietnam, and getting absolutely nowhere and hearing arguments that in America we don't have classes. That simply isn't true. Anyway, in the nineteenth century social class was a real thing. Nobody had a stronger class identity than the middle class. That's what I'm going to talk about next time. I can hardly wait. There was a working class, but not everybody saw themselves as workers, as a form of identity as opposed to something else. People can have multiple identities. When we talk about nationalism, that's an obvious point to make. If you ask people who they are, they might say they're Protestant or they're Jewish or they're Catholic or they're Muslim or they might say they're from this extended family or they're from this region. They're Bavarian or whatever. In the nineteenth century-class identity, the sense of being workers as a class apart was a reality. That's just the way it is. That was worth studying and people did some very good work on it. It's kind of come back, too. It's kind of come back. Anyone who's been in Britain, where class identity is so revealed by language, there isn't anyplace, including France or any place else that I know where a difference in accent is so revealing as to not only where you are from, but who you are in terms of social class. It's really just amazing. It remains true in France and some other places. There was a strangler. There are always these stranglers around in Britain. There was one guy was this hardcore killer, a bad guy killing a bunch of people about fifteen years ago. Finally, they get all these experts on language and he called up I guess a radio station and sort of "Here I am. Come and get me" kind of thing. They had him pegged where he was within something like ten miles of where they ended up arresting him, which is in Bradford in the north of England. Language is one of the ways that people reveal their class. In the nineteenth century we're talking about workers and how some workers, but not all, began to see

themselves as proletarians. That seems like one of those trendy words, but it meant something to people. A proletarian is somebody dependent on their own labor, usually unskilled or semi-skilled, in order to survive. There are two aspects to the term "proletarianization." One is kind of the objective sense that you are a laborer. You may be a harvester. You may pick grapes for the wine harvest. You may be carrying around large boxes, which is what I did at Alice Love's Jams and Jellies in Portland, Oregon, or at Kellogg's of Battle Creek, where I also worked, totally unskilled, but again that was not going to be my lifelong identity, because I was able to go on to do something else. But in Europe you were born into the proletariat in most cases. If you grew up as a Catholic, in this part of France, you still would have been a practicing Catholic, a Catholic guy, a young boy or young woman in and around Saint Etienne or in Lille, the chances were overwhelming that you were going to follow your parents into the mines. You were going to go in the mines. As a matter of fact, again I hate giving these French examples, but there's an expression that's really only used there that I've ever heard when a kid screws up, does something he's not supposed to. What they say is deux semaines dessous une benne, which is if you spend two weeks ducking down like this and having to help guide this cart full of coal up and down the railroad tracks, you won't screw up like that again, little boy. The sense of you were born into the world of work. In America there were all these kinds of literature, the equivalent of Boys Life about remarkable assents into the social stratosphere, that America was the land of opportunity. Well, America was the land of opportunity, to be sure, with availability of land. But cases of social mobility were actually fairly limited. This was certainly the case in almost all of Europe. You were essentially born into, for most people, this status. The other thing that happened, and this explains the rise of class consciousness, is that people who--suddenly the bottom drops out of their economic life--that's a fairly appropriate analogy for today--who were artisans, who were craftsmen, become really the first, depending on where we're talking about. It begins really about the turn of the century, that is, 1800 or slightly before, but mostly afterward, by 1830 in England and then follows in other countries in many, many places. Artisans and craftsmen are really the first to see themselves as a class apart. Not unskilled workers. Why? This is pretty obvious. Artisans and craftsmen are educated up to a point. They have a sense of dignity about their trades. They have organizations. They have mutual aid societies, for example. There's a craft guild organization in France called the compagnonnage. This came from the medieval times when they built the big cathedrals and all of that. They have organization. They have a sense

of pride in craft dignity. Karl Marx, who was a pretty smart guy, he got a lot of things wrong, but he got a lot of things right. Karl Marx wrote in the 1830s and 1940s about how workers' wages were declining. He was right for artisans. There's no question about it. Artisans are at the forefront of every single social and political movement that you can think of in the French Revolution. There we go. Who stormed the Bastille? It was artisans, 1830 in France, 1848 in Austria, in Berlin, in Paris. It was artisans. Why all of a sudden do they get mad? There's really two reasons, two things that happened to artisans that caused their economic situation to go downhill. First of all, the French Revolution or the effects of the French Revolution destroy the guilds. Anybody can be a tailor or a shoemaker or whatever, a glassmaker. If you learn the skills, there's no one who's going to say no, you can't get in this union. You might be able to get in this mutual aid society or friendly society, but you can't do the work because the guilds are gone. The French Revolution banishes the guilds, laissez faire, Adam Smith, et cetera, et cetera. There are laws against unions. Strikes are not legal in France until 1864. The corporation acts are reinforced by the fear in Britain of the French Revolution. But what happens is you've got what can be called, Bill Sewell has called it that, a friend of mine in Chicago, the crisis of expansion. You've got all these people now who say, "Hey, I'm going to be a tailor, too." If you lived in Berlin or someplace in the 1840s, you would hear tailors walking along the street pushing carts full of clothes that they had made from the beginning to the end, of suits being sold for practically nothing. Why? Because there's so many other people making suits as well. Also, mechanized production means that you can buy suits off the rack, and they're getting very little for their suits. They didn't wake up and think, "Gee, I can't remember how to make a suit." They got these suits. They can make them and they can't sell them. Their wages are declining. Are they mad? They're furious. Who do they blame? They blame the state and they blame the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the middlemen. For example, in the case of tailors, there are a lot of middlemen who've got capital. What do you do? You say, "Look, I'm going to get a bunch of suits made. Here are all these tailors, they don't have enough to work." I'm not giving you a very good example, because I don't know a damn thing about being a tailor. But they say, "Okay, you guys do the sleeves. You guys do the pants, because you can do them all one after another and you don't have to worry about doing the rest of it. Then I'll pick up everything that you make." This is a continuation of rural industry. "Then I will sell it in the markets." Into World War I you still had single women in Paris now chained to their sewing machine, not literally, but they've got to pay off their sewing machine. The sewing machine starts

before electricity, but after electricity comes along. They're working by themselves. Their day isn't cut short anymore by the end of daylight. It's cut short by sheer fatigue and producing these goods for this market. These tailors, and shoemakers, and all of that, they're in every single movement. They are the ones who first say, "Hey, you know what? All we workers, we've got some stuff in common. This is amplified by residential patterns, people living in and around where they work, et cetera, et cetera. Mechanization also, I'll give you an example that I do know something about which is porcelain. Porcelain is one of these products that's a luxury good. Renoir, the great painter, started out-he was born in Limoges, France in 1841--Renoir starts out decorating plates. He painted plates. Along comes this new technological innovation. If you did, and I only did very briefly, make those model airplanes and stuff like that, there were little decals that you'd stick on the plane to represent the Spitfire, or whatever American fighters or boats. I'm not such a war guy, so I stopped that pretty quickly. So, somebody invents one of these decals that can be baked on to high quality plates between the first and second baking. Porcelain remains a luxury good. The people that used to paint them are sent to the warehouse where they work for about a third of what they would make as skilled painters. They didn't wake up one day and say, "Geez, I can't remember how you paint a plate anymore." No one's going to pay them to paint plates except for very special orders. Glassmaking is the same thing. People that formed bottles used to be very well paid. Then a machine is invented that comes along and does the same thing. It turns out bottles by the zillions to be filled with wine and whatever. They're out of luck. Are they mad? They're furious. Pretty soon they start thinking, "You know these unskilled people, we have some of the same grievances." They begin seeing themselves as a class apart. Class consciousness isn't sort of an invention of lefties from the 1970s like yours truly. It's not at all. It was a reality. It wasn't for everybody, but if you read a lot of literature, especially from London or from anywhere about the kinds of solidarities that people had because of their social class, and the sense that they formed a class apart and were relegated to sort of a permanent proletarian status by forces that they can't control--the state and big money and big capital. People would be a little better off if they were thinking about that now. Anyway, that's that. Having said that, I want to turn in the last ten minutes to--did I get all that in? Yes! I want to turn to something that complements that. That is a discussion of industrial discipline. One thing as workers learn to strike, going on to strike for better working conditions, for more money, for better hours, shorter hours, et cetera, et cetera, one has to imagine what the world looked like for them. What did they think about things that were happening to them? One of

the things that had happened to them was this sort of nineteenth-century end stage of the Industrial Revolution, that is, factory production. If you were an artisan, if you were a tailor--I keep using these examples, but they're so stuck in my mind--or shoemaker, you basically worked when you wanted. You worked in response to demand for your product. Many of these people were on the move, going from one place to the next. But you worked kind of when you wanted to, or when there was a demand for your product. If you were in domestic industry, and you were a woman working in the hinterland of Zurich, you worked when there was demand for your work. Then you took time off to nurse your child or to take account of the family to see how we were doing, if there was enough to tie through until the next week. You more or less worked on your own. A pottery baron called Josiah Wedgwood, you've probably heard of Wedgwood pottery, just before 1800 he's trying to think about how you make all these workers that he had-- how do you make them respond in the very same way, so they don't just kind of get up and wander off or spend time talking or enjoying themselves? How do you get them all to work at his single command? His dream, his fantasy was that he wanted a set of workers that responded as fingers on two hands in response to his command. That's what he wants. He and his successors create strategies of doing just that. In doing so they launch this sort of protracted struggle, which is very revealing about the bigger processes at play in the nineteenth century. Factories have a lot to do with that. Hereto, I say that with such intensity for my bad experiences working in factories. I once was working in Alice Love's Jams and Jellies. I was supposed to be to work about 6:00 in the morning after a night I probably shouldn't have had. The last thing I remember was the guy. He didn't like me because I was a college guy. I always had my mighty maize and blue Michigan shirt on. He said, "Listen, idiot"--I was on jams and jelly duty. There was a huge machine. You have to imagine an enormous accordion. They'd put all these berries in there. Then the press would squeeze them into jelly, which we would drink or eat and make ourselves sick. It would build up a lot of pressure and the last thing I remember him saying was, "Listen, idiot," that was me, "don't leave your finger on that button very long." As I was trying to figure out who had beaten whom the night before in the American League, the thing blew up. This enormous tidal wave of boysenberry juice engulfed me and I was burned. Actually, I was out on sick leave for two weeks or I was just down playing basketball and getting paid to do that. This tidal wave of boysenberries, a forklift with about something like 2,000 jars of apple butter spun out of control. It was a terrible, terrible mess. But the point of this is that I hated the foreman. As I left, I said, "Too bad for you, foreman." I take that

back. I didn't say that. Anyway, the point of this is that factories become first of all a way of maintaining industrial discipline. In the first factories in Britain they were not there because you had these machines that were there immediately. James Watts' steam engine was not used really for about fifteen years after it was made, because there weren't many things it could do. The first factories were there putting together artisans, semi-skilled workers, and unskilled workers as a form of industrial discipline. When you think, if you see postcards--at the end of the nineteenth century, really about 1900, the craze for postcards begins in Europe and in the United States, too. Now, these postcards are extremely expensive if they have people in them, particularly people at work. They're really, really--and I have all sorts of them from Limoges and the porcelain industry and from the strikes. But if you see these pictures, when workers had their pictures taken together, they're always in front of the door. Why? You had to enter the door or leave the door. The signal was given by the clock and by the bell that called you to work. If you were late, too bad for you. You could be docked or fired, and there are lots more people out there who would like to have those jobs. What happens in the nineteenth century is that the factory, before really its role as a houser of big thundering machines, in many places the factory was first and foremost a way of putting discipline on workers. There's a terrible case in Brooklyn, I think in 1912 or something, where 150 or 200 women were burned to death because the bosses or the foreman had locked the doors, so they couldn't go out and "chatter." What they begin to do in the middle of the nineteenth century is have rules, regulations for work, what you can do, what you can't do, and what you must do. You can't talk. If you were a porcelain worker and something blew up in the oven, that was docked from your salary. In order to watch over these workers, they bring in the foreman, fore-people. There was a strike in Limoges because the fore-person, a woman, was very religious and she made the workers kneel down on the ground and pray with their knees on the stone before work started. No separation of church and work there. They bring in foremen who are going to enforce these--to see if you're a good worker or if you're a bad worker. Now, workers resent this very much. How did workers view the bosses, for example? In the 1820s and 1830s, you're still working in smaller units of production in most places in Europe if you're in a factory. You've got an issue with the boss. The boss is somebody who might give you a little extra on Christmas, or something like that. The boss is somebody you knew. There was a sense of, "Well, you're not doing me right now. This isn't right and I'm going to leave until you get it together and do

better by me." The boss is a presence. He's there all the time, as my boss at Dennis Uniform Manufacturing Company, also in Portland, Oregon. He was there all the time. By the time the foremen start coming in, the foreman is representing the boss. The foreman is somebody who's brought in from the outside or promoted, often unjustly, from within. The foreman replaces the boss as the one who's hitting on the young female workers. They call it in French the droit de cuissage--that's rather crude--the right of hitting on and scoring, putting oneself in a power relationship with a female employee. The foreman begins to represent the boss. The boss now during strikes, the language of workers during strikes is, "The boss, he's a letch. He's a drunk. He eats too much." He doesn't care whether you live or die. He's still somebody you see kind of walking through and all that. You don't like him that much, but he's still a presence. The strikes at the end of the nineteenth century are very, very different. The boss often is a very distant person. He's sending telegrams from London or sending telegrams from Frankfurt to his foreman demanding this or that. In the case of a strike in Limoges, France, the owner of the factory was an American called David Haviland, as in Haviland porcelain, at one point actually demands that the U.S. Embassy send in the U.S. Marines, as if that was possible in order to put an end to this disturbance, this disorder in his factory. He or she has become a symbol of capitalism, protected by the state and protected by the army. This is how workers, not all workers, but in many cases, view the boss. Industrial discipline has been imposed by these rules, these regulations, and these foreman. If you don't like it, too bad. Women workers are no longer allowed to nurse their children, to bring their children or to go out and nurse them. They are forced to eat inside the factory. That's why tuberculosis rates are enormous, particularly in mining and in factories. You'll see this in Germinal. It's really kind of an amazing book. This view of workers of their bosses tells you something about this long process, it's very uneven and not everywhere, but still there--that explain this massive kind of movements of strikes that you found in all sorts of countries--Northern Italy, Barcelona, Moscow in 1917. Huge strikes would be terribly important in 1917 in Moscow. Then something else happens, and I'm going to end with this, because it's in a minor way an amazing tale about a colleague, a brilliant woman I know called Michelle Perrot, something she wrote in the late 1970s. It tells you so much about our time. In the beginning of the twentieth century an American engineer called Taylor comes up. Remember, this is the time when the Olympics have started up again. You measure how fast people can run the 100 or how far they can throw the shotput. You're measuring things. Car races have begun. Bicycle race, which was a bloody

spectacle with bikes careening out of control all the time. You see working class heroes getting just mangled, in part through each other's manipulations of trying to knock them off. But you're measuring things. Taylor comes up with this way of measuring units of production, the ultimate in industrial discipline. You were on the assembly line. They will count the number of units you can do of jars of apple butter that you can turn out. If you're not turning out enough, "See ya', we'll get somebody else. A lot of people want that job. We'll see ya'." That's why the wages stay down, because there are a lot of people who want those jobs because of the growth. He becomes the darling of the French car manufacturers. He becomes the darling. He is a hot item. He would be on People magazine, if they did have one, because he comes and tells them how they can get more effort out of their tired, fatigued workers by counting them. It's just like that all the way. Michelle Perrot, when she wrote a brilliant article and edited a book I did a long time ago, her article was called "The Three Ages of Industrial Discipline." She had an amazing phrase for the late 1970s. This was before, thank god, cell phones. It was before personal computers and all of that. There were computers, but they weren't personal computers. She said that in this post-industrial age, where you've got the rust belt, and you've got factories being torn down outside Detroit, and in Flint, and in Torrington, and Waterbury, and places like that, in Pittsburgh, and almost anywhere you can name that was the heart of the American industrial experience. She predicted in 1978 that what would replace Taylorism would be the computer. The computer will measure in your cubicles your performance. She said in the end, the foreman would be replaced by "the quiet violence of the computer." Kind of amazing. See you on Wednesday.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 9 Transcript October 1, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: You know why I am dressed up? When I do this course and when I do the first half of the French course I do a lecture on the bourgeoisie, the middle classes. Middle class was a form of self-identity that was constructed in the way being a worker was constructed, or being a noble. One day I was about to go out among you all and talk about Daumier, and show you some Daumier slides about the bourgeoisie, and my wife said to me, "You can't go talk about the bourgeoisie looking like you usually do. You've got to look like you mean it, like you have a vague sense of knowing it." So, as a result, look at this. I wear this about once a year. Unfortunately, I wear it to funerals. The last time I wore it was something Bill Clinton had, some mutual friends. I only have one tie that I share with my son. We had to find him another tie underneath his soccer shoes. Then we got into New York and went to this party, and we're all dolled up and all that. Then we went out to a restaurant and I lost my one tie. The last time I bought a tie, ties cost fifteen dollars. In Ann Arbor I bought a tie. This is a seventy-five dollar tie. This is my only tie. That's a long way of answering your question about why I look like this today. But I hope to make some sense of that in the lecture. So, thank you very much. I didn't set that question up, did I? I didn't ask you, "Please ask that question." When you're looking at me dressed, it's not Halloween. That's the first thing I thought. When you look at me dressed like this, please try to think, knowing me a little bit as you do, why it was that it meant a lot to dress like this in the nineteenth century. The middle classes started dressing like this in the nineteenth century, dark with a little bit of color. When you see Daumier or you see Delacroix's famous, which I forgot the slide, Liberty Leading the People, and you see the bourgeois, there with his top hat, he's dressed in a bourgeois uniform like this. That emerges out of the bourgeois century.

While last time we talked about the construction of class identity for ordinary people, for working people, the bourgeoisie had as strong a sense of self-identity as any social class you could imagine. It was, as I'll make the point in a minute, difficult to get into that class if you weren't born into it. The fear of falling out of it was something that helps motivate lots of political things in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, in terms of being the bourgeois century--one of the things you see in countries, particularly in western Europe and Great Britain, in France and in Germany, and in Italy, is you see the middle classes wanting the political power commensurate with their economic status. If, in the eighteenth century--this is one of those truisms that happens to be true and can be exaggerated--the aristocracy, you were born into the aristocracy. If you hit the big time and you get lucky, you can buy your way in, thanks to the broke French monarchy. But the ideal aristocrat, and this is how an aristocrat would have talked about him or herself, was born into the aristocracy through blood, through family. It was an ascribed status. In the nineteenth century one of the things that happens with the French Revolution and with Napoleon is that the middle-class person and middle-class values seem to be something to be emulated. Once we've got an increase in the wealth of the middle classes and the diversity and complexity that I'll talk about in a minute, then you wanted the political power. You wanted the right to vote. You wanted access to information through the press and print culture. All of these things are closely tied to the middle classes. That's what I'm going to talk about today. Most of it is about bourgeois culture. That's why I'm dressed like this. I assure you that the minute this lecture is over, I will go back and like--I could never compare myself to Clark Kent--but I will find my phone booth and change back into normal duds. Let's talk a little bit about the middle class in the bourgeois century. The middle classes or the bourgeoisie are terms that we conveniently use. Marx talked about the bourgeoisie as being this extremely homogenous class. In fact, the word "bourgeois" has really more cultural connotations, maybe, than objective or social categorization, living in a bourgeois manner. We'll see some aspects of that in terms of access to private space, middleclass concepts of childhood, and that sort of thing. Middle classes is probably a better term. Bourgeois is equivalent of burgher, but middle classes is probably, for our point of view, a better term. It seems rather odd to be talking about the English bourgeoisie of Leeds, about which there is an excellent book, because bourgeois, after all, started out as a French word. In using and indeed insisting on the term "middle classes," what I'm suggesting is the enormous complexity of the middle class. There wasn't just one middle class. Yet the middle classes shared some cultural values and symbols in common and when challenged by ordinary

people could snap back in an extremely cohesive class-based manner. Marx had some of that quite correctly. In a Parisian newspaper called the Journal des Dbats in 1847, someone actually did a pretty damn good job of describing the bourgeoisie. "The bourgeoisie is not a class," the person argued. "It is a position. One acquires that position and one loses it. Work, thrift, and ability confer it," he argued, referring to himself, of course. "Vice dissipation and idleness mean that it can be lost." And, so, that old kind of aristocratic ethos of not working, of being idle, although it can be exaggerated, as we've seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nonetheless there was something to it. An eighteenth century noble let his fingernails grow long, sort of just hung out showing his good taste by living in an idle, aristocratic manner. The bourgeoisie did anything but that. Work was part of how they believed to get ahead, and getting ahead is what they wanted to do. The French Revolution, and here's an important point, I guess, opened the way by removing legal blocks in very many places to the career open to talents. Napoleon used to say tediously that in each soldier's backpack there was a marshal's baton, or staff that you could get promoted with good work, hard work, if you didn't get your head blown off in one of these battles. But certainly one of the things that comes out of his insistence on service to the state is creating a whole series of rewards that recompensed virtuous action and hard work. That's what the Lgion d'honneur, the Legion of Honor was all about. Making money was part of it. Of course, it was always in the nineteenth century sort of classic to poke fun at bourgeois culture, and in some cases the lack of it, and to ascribe to the middle classes philistine habits in which making money was really the only thing that counted. Certainly, Friedrich Engels, Marx's socialist partner--obsessed, as well he should have been, with the slums of the satanic mills of Manchester--he once wrote the following. He says, "One day I walked with one of these middle class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful, unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I'd never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the end of the corner of a street at which we parted, he remarked, And yet, there is a good deal of money to be made here. Good morning, sir. And he walked away." One employer wrote in the 1830s that, relative to his workers--is that the worker, I couldn't invent this, "should be constantly harassed by need, for then he will not set his children a bad example and his poverty will be the guarantee of good behavior." Of course, this is a caricature of middle class self-absorption, of narcissism, of this inveterate cruelty to the

classes below them. On the other hand, the more we study the middle classes--and in the 1960s people really didn't study the middle classes because they didn't like them very much. They studied workers. But there's been an awful lot of good work done on the middle classes. Among them my dear friend Peter Gay, his five volumes of the Bourgeois Century, take on the idea that the middle class lived without passion, and were philistines, and that sort of thing. The more we look at the middle class now, we see certainly that no matter where you look one of the things the middle class people did was form voluntary associations. Aristocrats didn't form voluntary associations. They didn't need to. The middle class formed voluntary associations, and many of these were for extremely charitable purposes, particularly in Britain. Again, the study that I referred to by somebody called Morris--I think it's Morris--on Leeds shows the kind of richness and depth to these voluntary associations in which people try to do an awful lot for ordinary people. It has a sense of moralizing. There's always this sort of top-down look about moralizing them, and trying to get the workers to drink less, trying to get them to go to church, trying to get them, when it was possible, for their children to become educated and stay in school. There's always this tension between families who needed children's income, however small that was. Across the nineteenth century, over a very long period, laws finally by the end of the century in most places made at least primary education obligatory, and in most cases free. Here's a ridiculous example. It's not a ridiculous example if you love animals. I'm a cat person, as I already said. The Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, these sorts of organizations really are one of the classic examples of bourgeois voluntary associations doing good things. They also get together to hang out with each other and sort of try to gauge who has more money than the other, and they get together for social reasons in the coffeehouses of England, and in the clubs, circles you call them in France, and their equivalents in Germany, and Italy, and Spain. One of the more ludicrous kind of mottos, we call it a devise, a motto, of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals was in one of the organizations in France, which said, "One must love animals, but not fraternize with animals." I don't know what that means, but the main thing is that they wanted to save animals from being beaten, almost beaten to death in many cases of horses. You can see how, in places in which bullfighting over the long run in the nineteenth and twentieth century, such as the very south of France and in Spain--there were always movements to try to protect the bulls, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.

For all the bad press that the middle class has had, and you can read some of this bad press in what you're reading, there is also this good side that should be evoked as well. That's a period. Certainly, in terms of organized religion, the middle class goes to church more than ordinary people, than workers, for sure. In the case of peasants it depends on where. As I said before, in many parts of France, the example that's well studied, you still had this de-Christianization. But certainly religion was a fundamental part of the British middle class's view of itself. The percentage of people who went to church could be exaggerated. There was a study in all of England. I don't think it was in Wales and Scotland, but at least it was in England, maybe in Wales, too, probably in Wales as well. I think it was in 1851 where they decided to look at every single church in England and Wales, let's say, and to see how many people went to church. They found to their horror that it was less than they thought. They also discovered that if everybody who had wanted to go to church had gone to various churches, Methodist for more ordinary people, Anglican, Catholic for the Irish and for a certain minority of British citizens, or Jews going to synagogue in the east end of London, that they couldn't have accommodated all these people. So there's a massive kind of church building campaign that has its counterpart in almost every country as well. Certainly in France after the Paris Commune of 1871 they start building churches in the working class districts perched on the edge of cities. More about that in another lecture. One could go on and on about this. Religion for the middle classes has a greater role in their lives than in working class cities. In the case of the peasants, there weren't any peasants left in England. I'll talk about that and it will be fun to talk about in one of these lectures. Anyway, there we go. How many people would have considered themselves middle-class? Again, self-identity, how people thought of themselves is one of those aspects that we want to discuss. How do we know? How would you know who is middle-class? When they first started doing censuses--and censuses are really a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and subsequent centuries, as I said before. The first census was in Copenhagen, I think, in the eighteenth century. The first real censuses do not come until the nineteenth century almost everywhere. They didn't ask people--they asked you your name and where you lived. In some cases they asked you your profession. But they did not say, "Are you middle class?" or "Are you not middle class?" There was a whole lot of work done in the 1970s on what they used to call the new urban history, which is counting people up and deciding who might well have considered themselves middle-class. There are a lot of dissertations written on that kind of thing. There

was one in the case of Paris. Inevitably I have to talk some about Paris because the work is so rich there. A woman called Adeline Daumard wrote a dissertation that was subsequently published called Les Bourgeois de Paris, or The Bourgeois of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. What she did is she looked at wills. The middle-class people had enough money to leave wills, therefore, their inventories after death. That's what you call them. That's one of the reasons we know about the explosion of print culture, because they inventoried the books that people read. I mentioned this in the context of Enlightenment, too, because you do have that, too. Taking the kinds of ways that she looked at social class, she determined that somewhere between seventeen and nineteen percent of the Parisian population in the first half of the nineteenth century would have been considered bourgeois, and would have considered themselves bourgeois, that is, in the middle classes. In Britain the percentage is higher. It probably approaches twenty-five percent. I can't remember the exact figures. That percent will continue to increase in the nineteenth century. You can already very well anticipate, from what you already know, where other parts of Europe that have large important middle classes. The old Hanseatic port cities of German, the German free cities that would become part of unified Germany in 1871--northern German cities in general, like Bremen, and Lbeck, and Hamburg above all. Hamburg's a huge port city. It's got a very enormous bourgeoisie. If you went to Madrid, you'd find a sizeable middle class, but it would be nothing that you would have if you compared Madrid to Barcelona. Barcelona is a really natural economy based upon important economic relations between its hinterland and Barcelona, and between Barcelona and the world, because it's a major port. So, you've got this big teaming middle class there as well. In the case of France, obviously places that have lots of industry and small businesses have middle-class people in large numbers, though not as large numbers as workers. Lyon would be a good example. Lyon has the most tightly closed middle class that you can imagine and still is. Lyon is very Lyon. What can one say? Again, northern Italy you find a huge vibrant middle class, but not in southern Italy. Naples is one of the biggest cities in Europe right through the early-modern period. You've got a large middle class, but most of Italy is extremely rural and what you had in Rome is you had clergy. It's a city, so you've got an important middle class. The further east you get, the smaller the middle class gets. In Russia, the estimates are about two percent of the population were middle class. Two percent, which isn't very much at all. And, of course, they are clustered in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, and in Kiev, now

Ukraine, always Ukraine but then part of Russia, in the large cities. In Poland, Warsaw had a large--I was just at a history museum, a fascinating one at Warsaw Museum a couple months ago. Warsaw, as Krakow, had a big middle class. Gdask, obviously, because it's a port city -but much of Poland was rural and wouldn't have that kind of middle class. Belgrade would have been the only city in the Balkans, outside of Istanbul, but Istanbul isn't in the Balkans, but with an important middle class. This is all perfectly obvious. Anyway, who are these folks and what do they want? They're not all--how am I going to do this? I'm going to do it like this. You have to imagine the middle class like this, that it's a pyramid. It's a pyramid with a small top and a big bottom. I'll show you a lithograph that really represents, two of these, in very interesting ways, I think compelling ways at the beginning. At the very top--think of Zurich. Think of any city you want. Zurich has a big middle class. So does Geneva for obvious reasons. But at the very top there are the great bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie. These are people who are big financiers. The nineteenth century bankers will become much more important for perfectly obvious reasons. These are big wholesale merchants who are making bundles shipping things from here to there. You won't yet find lawyers and people like that. What also makes them the high bourgeoisie or the big bourgeoisie, a small percentage, it doesn't really matter where this line goes, is that they have access to political power. Even if they're in Prussia, a place that's dominated by the nobles who are called the Junkers, as most of you know, they will still have access by virtue of their wealth to political power, which is exactly the way they want it. There's a revolution in France in 1830, yet another one that you can read about. Arguably--Marx says this and in a way it's sort of true--what it does is it brings to power in France the big bourgeoisie, and they have the ear of the king, LouisPhilippe, who calls himself the Citizen King. He would rule from 1830 to 1848. In the portraits of him, the paintings that he had done to represent who he was are very different than those of the Bourbon kings. The Bourbon kings are all looking like, even the pathetic successors of Louis XIV, they're looking like big people in chateaus who are kings of all that they see, which of course was more or less the case. Louis-Philippe's view of himself was that he was the Citizen King. That's what he calls himself. He's still the king. He was noble. He was not any bourgeois. But in the official paintings of him you see people dressed like me who are coming into the throne room. They're dressed like me in dark suits. They have power. He wants them in the painting with him. That's terribly revealing. It's terribly interesting.

So, these are people, these are big bankers, high financiers at the top. Then you've got other layers of bourgeoisie. You can kind of fill in the gap. Here we have smaller bankers, not in size but in money, industrialists, merchants, these kinds of people, and Daumier's, the great caricaturist's, least favorite people--lawyers. Lawyers rise up rapidly in popular esteem and usefulness. The middle class likes to see themselves as useful. You find lawyers reaching in there and, slowly, doctors. Remember doctors had very low social status. They were sort of a cut above the bad pun I make in what you read, ordinary field surgeons during Napoleonic battles, some of whom were butchers or people that knew how to wield a knife. Doctors increase a self-identity and become more important in the nineteenth century. You also find notaries no matter what country you're in. Notaries have a much bigger role in Europe than they do here. Notaries know where all the goodies are. When you buy property in France, by the way, if you have a mortgage you pay twelve percent right off the top goes to the notary just for holding in his office your deed. If you don't have a mortgage, you pay seven percent right off the top. So, notaries know all of the secrets of people with money. Notaries are important in all these countries, et cetera, et cetera. You can kind of fill in the occupation, but they share things together. Then at the bottom you have the petty bourgeoisie, and everybody's making fun of the petty bourgeoisie, but they too had a self-identity. I found one day in the stacks of the library at the University of Michigan a pamphlet that was actually the report on what surely must have been the last, but in any case was the first World Congress of the Petty Bourgeoisie. They met, appropriately enough, in Brussels. Can you imagine going to a professional history conference where they all had their little nametags? All they do is they start up your body and look at your nametags, and see if it's worth looking at your face. It's really pathetic. Can you imagine going to a conference like the World Congress of the Petty Bourgeoisie? "Hi, my name is Albert." But they had a self-identity. Who are in the petty bourgeoisie? Lots of these classically new nineteenth-century professions--schoolteachers. Schoolteachers were a way of social mobility for peasant families, whether they were in Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, no matter where they were. Out of the working class or out of the peasantry female schoolteachers become increasingly more important. They always were in Catholic schools because they were nuns with the big hats and all that, and doing a very good job, even though often they were undereducated and it was kind of hard for them to do that. But schoolteachers you'd find here, and also caf or tavern owners, weinstube owners. I'm just giving you a couple examples. These are the petty bourgeoisie.

Also, very importantly, what do you do with artisans and craftsmen? Master artisans own the tools that their journeymen work with. They rent or own their shops. When things are going pretty well they do pretty well themselves. But when things aren't going well, they don't do well. That's why they're on the barricades all these times, as you know, in the French Revolution--the French revolutions, and in the revolutions of 1848, as you shall discover in Vienna and Berlin, and other places. They're always there. These folks are here, too. This is your basic petty bourgeoisie. People are always dumping all over them needlessly. I will give you some example. If you've ever read the great French novelist--he was paid by the word, as you can see when he has descriptions of single sofas that go on for about two pages, but Balzac. Balzac is really the novelist of the bourgeoisie. When he describes Paris and the seventeen to nineteen percent of the population who are increasingly living in the western part of Paris, more about that another time, he describes it as a jungle. You count your money in the morning and then you count your money when you come home. By the way, your wife, who would in the census be listed as not working. If you were a shopkeeper, your wife was the one who kept care of the accounts. Your wife was the one who stood behind the counter when you were working, when you were an artisan. He describes this as a jungle. In order to really give an image of what it was like, I've got to find this thing someplace, but he's got this one magnificent print called the "Street of the Four Winds." That's a street in Paris, rue des quatre vents, near the Odon. It doesn't matter. But here's a guy dressed like me. There's a theme in this. He's dressed like me and he's wearing his bourgeois hat. I don't have one of those. My only hat has an M for Michigan on it. His one suit isn't going to blow off his body. But the wind is taking his hat, which is a symbol of who he is. The wind is carrying it away from his hand. In several hundred brushstrokes, Daumier captures the look of panic on his face because he's going to go home without his hat, and his wife's going to say, "Where's your hat?" He'll say, "The wind blew it away," and he's got to buy one, and they've got to put the money together so he is not going to fall off the ladder in this jungle. Then you have to imagine this as a ladder, like this. Social mobility is the goal. You want to have enough money to leave to your 2.2 children. Then to really make this go you'd have to have vines up here like the jungle. Then you'd have to grease this pole through bad economic times. Let's say in Europe 1816-17--don't write this down, if you do, you're compulsive--I'm compulsive--but 1826-27, 1840-41, really bad one, 1846-47, 1855, those are the really bad years. At that point, if you don't get credit, that's what's going on now, here. If you can't get

credit because people withdraw the credit, same thing, then here you go. Look out below. You slide down this pole. What happens down below here? Holy cow! That's the big sea. I saw this wretched movie called the Poseidon Adventure once. It had an image where the water is kind of coming up below and it's going to finally get to the top and there's no more room to breathe. This is how the people on the bottom part of this ladder viewed the demands of the working class. They want to vote, too. What if they vote and somebody wants to raise your taxes or something like that? Boy, that's scary. But what's down here? This is ordinary people. This is the other, what would it be in the case of Paris, eighty-three percent of the population. You're going to fall into the ranks of the proletariat if you're on the bottom rungs here. This is your jungle and you're trying to make it up there to the big time. The chances are that in these bad years you're going to fall down. But yet lots of people get up and the ranks of the middle class increases everywhere in the nineteenth century, in Russia, too, everywhere. That's simply the case. Now, if I could just bring this down and show you how this works, and talk about some accoutrements of middle class culture that you will recognize, many of you. This is the guy at the top. This is Daumier. Daumier is the greatest caricaturist in the nineteenth century and arguably ever, to make an extreme assertion, but it really is pretty true. This is what he captures, the prevailing mood in much of Europe in that money, more than blood if you were going to exclude places like Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Prussia, money talks more than blood. What is the man doing? He's counting his money. Remember I said that you counted your money in the morning and then you came home at night, and counted your money again to see how you've done. This is great. Remember I said the variations within the bourgeoisie? You can see this. Some of these images, this is really not very interesting art, but that's not the point. Look what this shows. The guy at the left here is a clerk. That's a very nineteenth-century profession, as it is for every subject. By the way, this is before the 1860s, because that's when real fountain pens are invented. He's got your basic quill pen there. Now look at the coats. They both have coats like mine, but there's a huge difference in them. This guy, if you have extraordinary eyes and can read upside down, you will be able to see that he is reading a newspaper on the price of colonial goods, imports. He is a wholesale merchant. He's one of these people that's at the very top of my triangle there. Look, this guy's got his coat, too. This is early in the century. You can tell. This is either the son-in-law or the would-be son-inlaw. The bourgeoisie didn't kiss and hug a lot. But he's got his hand draped rather daintily on the old guy's arm here. He's not about to embrace him and give him a big kiss on each cheek.

One day all of this stuff will be his, if he plays his cards right. They still had arranged marriages. Love could count for something, but marriages were still essentially, less so for the middle classes than for ordinary people, but economic relationships. That's what they were. They were economic relationships, wrangling over the dowry and that kind of thing. Look at our guy on the left. He's working very hard there. This pole that is put up there has a real sense of dividing these. It's like the barriers on my quite arbitrary, and not terribly well designed, triangle there. Do these people have something in common? Yes, they will in 1830 and they will in 1848, but the rest of the time they don't. He's dreaming about being this guy. He'll work very hard and he's educated. He had probably not secondary education. Most people didn't go to high school, secondary, lyce in France or gymnasium in Germany, et cetera, et cetera. It represents this world. By the way, we also know that this takes place in the center of Paris, right behind a big department store, subsequently the Hotel de Ville, but right near the town hall. Anyway, there we go. I've got to get my watch so I can keep track of things here. This is very common. You see this in the book you're reading, I think. These things can be represented spatially very easily. One of the themes of the long run is the emergence of increased development of prosperous western Paris, prosperous western London, prosperous center Vienna and other places, and increasingly impoverished east and the periphery. That's another theme. Still, through much of the period, and to a lesser extent still today, where you live in a building reflected how much money you had. The ground floor, in French the rez-de-chausse--this is the concierge there. The concierge will be somebody of very modest means. You'd probably place them in the petty bourgeoisie there. Then the big apartment on the first floor, high ceilings, big party, lots of people dressed like me there, a piano, more about pianos in a minute. So, this is my triangle upside down, isn't it? The more you go up there, you're still within the middle class. The guy above has these little Napoleonic beds there. I hope he's not closing his ears against his own baby there--but no, obviously this is a different house. He's a musician. This is all rather banal but nonetheless telling. You've got an artist up here with not much money, but he still has a little bit of furniture, not much, his nosey neighbor looking at his painting. Then on the top you've got the poorest of them all, besides the cat who's on the roof up there, you've got a seamstress. Anyone looking at this very popular lithograph would immediately see that she has some dignity left. Why? Because she has not yet pawned her mattress. In Zola's great novel, L'Assommoir, Gervaise dies like a dog on a bed of straw, because there was no more mattress. She must be at the very top.

Now these rooms then became in the twentieth century student rooms and then were transformed into enormously expensive lofts. But this is a way of visualizing the special concomitance of what I'm talking about. People were aware of what these symbols meant. This is your classic Hamburg financier's apartment. We don't need to go on and on about the kind of material culture of wealth, but there it is. Let's go on and on about it in another one that's easier to pick up for your eyes there. Here again, we know we're on one of the lower floors. Why? Because you see the trees outside the window. You've got a domesticated animal. Ordinary people didn't have as many domesticated--dogs had a real purpose. They bring the sheep down the mountain. My wife just came down the mountain two weeks ago bringing the sheep down from friends of ours in the village. All these dogs are useful things to keep the sheep in line and all of that. This is all obvious stuff. You've got slippers. Ordinary people did not wear slippers. You've got a domestic servant. Domestic servants cost almost nothing. It was considered to be a way of moving up the ladder to say that you had four domestic servants instead of three. You've got brass or copper here on the heater. That's a good sign. You've got very fancy chairs. Look, these are very good chairs, sort of Louis-Philippe chairs. You've got print culture, a big old porcelain plate above there, and you've got that bourgeois accoutrement, the piano. The piano replaces the harpsichord. Leon Plantinga, who is in J.E. College, who's a retired professor of music, has got great stuff on this, the role of the piano and the emergence, along with William Weber, who taught at Long Beach, the emergence of the public concert, as opposed to the chateau concert or the church concert, the public concert. Along with that comes the piano. Pianos were expensive, but the middle class has pianos. Working people don't have pianos. Middle-class people have pianos. You also see something else that's important here. There's more than one room. You'll see in a minute there's even more than two rooms. There are lots of rooms. What the middle class wants, all those people in that triangle, they want privacy. They want privacy. They want their own rooms. She's playing the piano. It's all obvious stuff. There's the kitchen. This is not the wife. This is the domestic with her children, who are part of the team who has been hired to help run this household. There again you see the trees. We're in the same apartment there. You have real, real copper pots. Back before the Bush dollar, people would buy, bring back from Paris and from Europe these enormously heavy copper pots. I've carried so many of them back. It's just incredible. Ordinary people did not cook with things like that. There we go. These are the kinds of symbols of all of this.

The middle class wants privacy and they also developed something else. This is almost trite to say, because so many people have said it and it can be exaggerated, but the middle class arguably helps create the notion of childhood. In many early-modern paintings children are portrayed as sort of little squished up adults and that sort of thing. Children come into their own in the nineteenth century. Ordinary peasants' children, everybody slept with the animals often along with the adults. Most ordinary people--and some of the worst tenements in Europe were in Edinburgh, and in Glasgow, and in Lille in France, but also in Berlin and lots of places. There were no secrets. Everybody slept in the same room. There were no secrets at all. What the middle class wants, besides social mobility and access to political power, is they want space. The notion of childhood, childhood didn't exist for ordinary people. You started working, helping out when you were five or six years old. You started tending the animals in the little courtyard as they would call it, taking care of chickens and rabbits, and things like that. Working people, their children went to work right away, as soon as they could make anything. If they were poor and didn't have jobs, then they were sent out to beg. Childhood became a middle class phenomenon. To be sure, nobles had children, but it was a different way of bringing up your children. Nobles did not send their children to public schools or even to private schools. They were educated, to some extent at least, by private tutors. Even the notion of the children's hour, the children's room, the idea of a children's room, of having your own room or a room shared with a sibling, was something that was just inconceivable for the majority of Europeans, the vast, vast majority of Europeans. The children's hour--I can even remember the horror show of being summoned for the children's hour, when you're supposed to come out when there were guests and run through your extraordinarily modest bag of tricks for the guests. Then you would be sent sort of packing. Since I couldn't play a note on the piano, I had been expelled from piano after two weeks and sent back to the playing fields by a nun in Portland, Oregon, I didn't have many tricks to show. But the children's hour, all of this stuff comes out of the middle class. How about birth control? How about not having ten or eleven children? We have friends, one of whom unfortunately just died, very older friends who were born in the early 1930s in the south of France. One had thirteen brothers and sisters, and the other eleven. They grew up in absolute misery. They were a very, very Catholic family in the center of France. The middle class, particularly the French middle class, start reducing their number of children. France is a particular case because they get rid of--you could get around it by primogeniture. The plot of

land has to be divided up into two, or three, or four, or five, or twelve. What if you own no land? Not so good. So, they begin having 2.2 children or something like that. Birth control--in some parts of Europe people think that birth control really started with peasants and then moves up to the upper classes, but basically, particularly in the case of France where it's been, like most things, studied to death, birth control really begins with the middle classes. They are limiting their children so that their children can be the son of, and inherit the business and hopefully be left with enough money to make it go. A print culture. That was just an example. The whole salon, the idea of going to see art shows. It really starts in the eighteenth century. The middle class wants to be seen rather like the Dutch middle class that we talked about in the seventeenth century. They want to be seen having paintings. They wait in line to go to theatres. This is all Daumier. This is the morceau, the piece that you're obliged to swallow after dinner. Here's the little girl being trotted out to play a few notes for the quite bored people who are sitting there and waiting. Even the idea of "It's your birthday, papa." You didn't take time out to celebrate a birthday if you were an ordinary person having to get to the fields at 4:00 in the morning in the summer, or going to work during the day. The culture of childhood is really all there. Also, there's a whole notion, and here again this would probably fit rather awkwardly into the birth control description, but there's this whole sense of being prepared that emerges with the middle class. One of those sort of accoutrements--I once, when I gave the equivalent of this lecture, I had an old battered umbrella. I was trying to explain how people on the top rung were trying to beat down people at the bottom. I ended up smashing this umbrella, sort of the imaginary of somebody smashing their guitar onstage. But the point is that the umbrellas come with the middle class. They are black umbrellas. They're not these big colored things you have now. It was the idea of protecting that one suit. I'm from Oregon. We didn't carry umbrellas, because it rained all the time anyway and I'd just lose it. Umbrellas are middle-class accoutrements along with the piano and along with the children's room, and along with the children's hour, and along with the idea of not having too many children, and along with the top hat, and with the idea of wanting access to information through the newspapers, wanting the right to vote, probably not wanting those people down below you on the ladder to vote, but demanding that you have the right to vote. They all shared these things in common. Lastly--gazing at his watch--in the last one minute thirty-five seconds that remains to me, the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and this is particularly true of Germany and France, and of England, too, and of other places--they want the right to bear arms. They want to be in the

national guard. The national guard might hypothetically be there in case there was an invasion of France or Germany by, I don't know, some distant place, the Fins or something most unlikely. But the main reason they wanted to join the national guard--and you had to own property to be in the national guard. You had to be defined as a property-owning citizen to have the right to vote. In all of these countries the right to vote was defined, until you have universal male suffrage, by how much taxes you paid and how much property you own. You can measure where you are on this ladder by how much taxes you paid. They didn't want to pay a lot of taxes, but property reflects one's belief in one's own social worth. That's the way they looked at it. No longer was it the worth of blood. So, they formed these national guards, particularly after revolutions and after 1848, or after 1830. For a while they go march around. But these are mainly there to protect them against the workers. Should one day all of these people try to rise up, climb up this ladder, you'll be down there to stomp on their fingers or to shoot them down. It doesn't last very long. Pretty soon, this guy's tired. This isn't Daumier. I don't know who it is. It doesn't matter. It's not very good. He's had it. He's freezing. His wife is kind of looking at him like, "I don't know why you're doing this stuff, marching around in the middle of the night. No one's going to rise up anyway." This won't last. His old blunderbuss there on the let will be put back in the closet, or taken out to slay deer, or some damn thing. That will be the end of it and they'll turn it over to more professional repressive forces such as armies. Daumier's light lines, and this is the last one, disappear in this painting, which is called the Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1934-don't write it down, in Paris. It's a street that no longer exists. It disappeared when Haussmann built the boulevards in the 1850s and 1860s. It was selected to disappear because it recalled an event in the early 1830s when these bourgeois panicked and start going into a house full of very ordinary people and simply shooting them all. The light lines disappear with Daumier. He did another one of these after a massacre in 1848 in Rouen and it's been lost. We don't have it. Rue Transnonain. H.D. Daumier at the bottom left. The middle classes, for all of their insistence that they have access to information, at least in the case of France they cheered on a press law in 1835 that kept Daumier from touching political scenes such as this which were deemed too sensitive. The rue Transnonain, where this happened in the center of Paris, simply disappeared. It didn't quite disappear from the collective memory of people thinking about Parisian things. In conclusion, the middle classes extremely vary. They share much. They have a common material culture. They share a belief in achieved status, as measured by the amount of property that you had. They want to vote. They want a collective voice in decisions. For all

the variety within the middle classes, so beautifully depicted by Daumier and other people, they still, when push came to shove, shared an awful lot in the bourgeois century, that of the nineteenth century. Have a good weekend. See you on Monday.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 10 Transcript October 6, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: I'm going to talk about some of my favorite people today. Over the weekend I was at a memorial service and a conference in honor of my late mentor, the great historian and sociologist, Charles Tilly. When I first knew him, which was a long time ago, he was working on collective violence. He's someone in his career who published literally fifty-one books and over 600 articles, but above all was a generous mentor to a whole bunch of people, including yours truly. He was working on collective violence. He once told me--in fact, I couldn't find exactly where he wrote this, if he did--he once told me, and I mentioned this the first day, "It's bitter hard to write the history of remainders." Some of the people I'm going to talk about today didn't see themselves as remainders in history, but they're people who didn't quite fit in, and were really overwhelmed and ultimately defeated by the economic, social, and political processes. If one of the themes of the course and of any course, really, I suppose, that deals with the modern world experience, especially in this day of globalization, is the dynamic duo of capitalism or large-scale economic change and the state, you're going to see that today in some of the folks that I'm talking about. I once used the example of trying to get you to imagine parachuting over the European continent over a very slow descent. Let's say now from maybe mid-sixteenth century until mid-nineteenth century. If you could see every incident of collective violence, of political protest, popular protest that occurred--and all protest is ultimately political--by far the most prevalent would have been the grain riot. This itself is terribly significant and so is its disappearance, given what I just said about the state and large-scale economic change. Another way to imagine this is if you had a Richter Scale that moved or that registered every incident of collective violence. Tilly and his whole team were counting up every single incident of collective violence that they could find in Europe between mid-eighteenth century,

in terms of his study, or even earlier than that, and 1936. They would come to the same conclusion that you would, were you floating over this great continent for that period of time. What I'm going to do today is sort of a trilogy, talk about three things, and they're all related. First, grain riots. Second the swing movement, Captain Swing, drawing on the classic book a long time ago of Eric Hobsbawm and George Rud, two truly great historians along with Tilly. Third, talk about something that I did, the Demoiselles of the Arige, and I'll make that clear in a while. All three fit together, I think, very nicely. One of the underlying themes, which you'll see, is that popular protest and collective violence attached to popular protest is not random. It can be spontaneous, but it's not illogical. There's a logic to popular protest right through the ages in the early-modern period as well as in the nineteenth century, and ordinary people put forth their demands by protesting and, in doing so, hope to affect change, to appeal to authorities who hopefully will do the right thing, often imagining a world in the past where a sense of justice prevailed. In terms of grain riots I'll talk about the just price, because they talked about it. Having said that, let me enter the world of grain riots. I'll give you some examples. This is from Spain, 1856, with the pretext of the high price of bread and for lack of work. The workers of Valladolid and Burgos rose and burned flour stores, mills, and inspection offices. The civil governor intervened to put down the rising, but the rebels overwhelmed him and attacked the chiefs of his forces. The sacking and burning continued. Most likely, as a consequence of the spreading of news of the incident, disturbances also spread to the countryside and to other cities. The governor of Palencia tried to hold back the uprising in his city, but he had to retreat before a hissing crowd. In Benavente, Rioseco, and along the Castille Canal, the disorders recurred. They had the characteristics of the old type of rebellion aimed at spectators and hoarders, among whom the masters of workshops were counted. In their hatred, the insurgents set fire to shops and storehouses with the cry of, "cheap bread, cheap bread," and attacked the boats that served for the transport of grain as well as putting the torch to grain not yet harvested in the fields. If you back up almost a century ago in France, if you look at the memoirs of a royal official from May 3, 1775: "The musketeers, who had been warned the day before, hurried to the markets. The fleeing rioters overturned baskets full of bread and blocked the way to the horses. It was 9:00 a.m. The watch was supposed to be getting its orders at that hour and the people had already gone to the bakers and seized the bread they found in the shops. That pillage had a special character. People did it without violence. The shops of the bakers were

emptied and those of the pastry makers and the dealers and other foods which were equally exposed were left untouched." Or 1816 in England, East Anglia: in early summer a surprise came that the agricultural laborers (who we will come back to hear about in a little while) of East Anglia had come out in revolt. Conditions had worsened since the end of the Napoleonic war and riots and disturbances were everywhere in the towns. The point is that I could give you examples from virtually every country over a very long period of time and the grain riot would dominate. This is France-based, but it's true of almost everywhere--again, do not write this down--men fight for food in the following years particularly. They come in waves, 1693-94, 1698, 170910, 1728, 1739-40, 1749, 1752, 1768, 1770, 1775 a big one, 1785, 1788-89, 1793, 1799, 1811-12, 1816-17, 1829-30, 1839-40, 1846-47, 1853-54, and then never again. By never again, I mean in France never again and slowly the grain riot disappears as a form of political protest, of collective violence or collective nonviolence, depending on the case. That's the big question. What's going on here? Popular protest is a way of finding out what's going on when you look at all this stuff. Why do the grain riots disappear as a form of collective violence? Why? Here's a placard, that is a poster, scrawled in the town of Vaville in the West of France in 1709. "We are dying of hunger. We must absolutely order you to set prices on bread and grain or else we will break from our homes like enraged lions, weapons in one hand, fire in the other." Arson--fire, by the way, is one of those my friend, Jim Scott at Yale, calls weapons of the weak. A match to a harvest or a roof of a chaumire, a thatched cottage, can do some serious mischief. What these grain rioters want to do, very ordinary people, men and particularly women-remember, women are responsible for the household economy. Also young people and also children. What they want to do is they're putting forth claims. They want the government, the monarchies, the administrators, the officials, the intendants, the governors, the sheriffs in England to set the price of bread, as Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins had wanted them to. Why? To set the price of bread. To keep the price of bread low so that everybody would have access to buying bread. Bread--literally, that commodity, whether dark bread in the poorer regions of central Europe or in the south of France or in parts of Spain and southern Italy, or white bread, which is more associated with more prosperous peasants, represented more than half of the expenses of ordinary people, not just food but bread. Bread is what people ate. Black bread in the poorer areas; white bread in the wealthier areas, to make a generalization. There were all different kinds of bread. Here's how I can approach this. In the town of Liege, which is in Wallonia,

that is in what's now eastern Belgium, Liege, famous for its cork among other things, and now part of the rust belt of eastern Belgium, they had a municipal statute, that is a municipal regulation, from about the fourteenth century. The date 1317 sticks in my mind somewhere. I must have read that decades ago. It said that on market day merchants from other places would not be allowed in to buy grain until the third day of the market. By the way, the term for merchants they used were engrosseurs, which has a sense in French of a bunch of people who would make themselves fat. Why? Because they could afford to buy bread at the price that nobody else could afford. They wouldn't be allowed in until the third day of the market. But, of course, that's not what happens through most of European history. The pressure from these crowds, the logic of these crowds is to force municipal authorities in the name of order--but perhaps, who knows, in the name of justice--to set a price of bread so that everybody could have a shot at it. As some wag once put, criticizing this kind of social history, "Well, it's pretty obvious that grain riots occur on market days in areas in which there is grain being exported out of a region." But that is precisely the point. The peasants or townspeople don't riot. Ordinary people don't riot necessarily when the price of grain reaches its absolute maximum. When they riot, they seize grain or they pillage shops, at the moment when--particularly when they see grain being taken out of the community, removed from their sense of moral authority over something upon which they depend to live. Women, as I said before, played the major role in grain riots. Why? Because they're responsible for the household economy. Right through this whole period there's a familiar scenario. People pour into town for market day. They see the stagecoaches, the diligences, the wagons carting the grain away and they stop it. They stop it. It's the same format everywhere. It's as if you had some sort of Internet, or CNN, or something like that telling people, "Here's how you grain riot." But they don't rip off the grain and they don't rip off, as the one example I gave you, fancy pastries and stuff like that. They take the grain often to a communal piece of property, such as the commons or the shed, the covered market. Some of the most fantastic examples are in the south of France, but all sorts of places, too. They sell the grain to ordinary people at what they consider to be the just price. They use that expression, "the just price." There's a sense of moral outrage that some forces they can't control are taking away what they need to survive. In 1789, a year you know, what's the big collective action in Paris? It's the seizing of the Bastille, of course, but above all it's the attack on the customs barriers, the tax offices that ring Paris, which forced the price of food, grain,

bread, everything up higher. They attacked them as a symbol of what they considered to be an unfair economy that's depriving them of the right to have enough to eat. So, these wagons that are carrying grain away, who's in these wagons? Who are these folks and what are they doing? They're merchants and they know that when they're buying up grain, where are they taking it? They're taking it to Berlin, or Stuttgart, or Munich, or to Milan, or to Paris, or to Lyon. Why? Because that grain will command even a higher price there, where you've got all these people. What is the interest of monarchies and other forms of tyranny, if you will? It's their interest to feed the cities first. The growth of cities, the growth of bureaucracies, of the state, the growth of garrisons who have to be fed increases the pressure on grain in times of harvest failure. Grain riots not only have the timing of markets when grain is leaving the town, but obviously the subtext is that in times of these cyclical harvest failures. The harvest fails. Credit is withdrawn. The price of bread goes up and the riots start. If you look at where the riots start in any of these countries that I've talked about, it's in response to grain being taken out of rural regions and being taken to cities to get higher prices. You've got the merchant on the wagon, too, and you've probably got his driver. Who else do you have there, increasingly? You've got the Guarda Civila in Spain, or you've got various police in the Italian estates, or you've got the tough, hardened Berlin police, or the Prussian army, or you've got

the gendarmes or the marchausse, as they called them in the eighteenth century, or the gendarmes in the nineteenth century. Here again is a way of looking at this theme. The state and capitalism are on the wagon here. You've got the merchant and you've got the police guarding him. That's the dynamic duo of change over the long run. To be sure, people who have big plots of land in Pomerania, or in northern Italy, or in the Beauce south of Paris, around Chartres, or someplace like that, these people are not out grain rioting. What are they doing? They're hoarding. They're waiting until the price of grain even goes higher. That's why a form of popular protest, of collective action throughout this whole period are attacks on hoarders. 1789--you read about it in the book. The famine plot, the idea that wealthy aristocrats are trying to starve out the poor to get their way and that hoarders have huge, just sacks of grain, which they often did, in their chateaus. They're holding it from the market and laissez faire says, "Let the market decide the price." "Okay, let's keep that stuff back. People will go hungry. Too damn bad for them. They should have more money." Over and over and over again in all of these places the grain riot is the most important form of collective violence, of popular protest. Then it just disappears. Again, France is the most studied, but it disappears

earlier in Britain. You'll know why already. You already know. I'll tell you again in a minute. There ain't no peasants left in Britain. In France, the last wave is 1855. Now, there are protests at the end of the nineteenth century against the high cost of food. One shouldn't imagine people surrounding the Stop N Shop and blocking it with their little pushcarts that they're putting their frozen food into, but they're the equivalents of that. There are protests against the high cost of food. Food still is an important dynamic in protests. In World War II, for example, irritation about the rich doing even better than ever, and rationing cards and all that business. But the grain riot simply disappears as a form of popular protest in Europe, period. It doesn't mean that bread wouldn't be terribly important in the Russian Revolution. It does. There are riots in Russia against the high price of bread. But the classic beginning in Western Europe and moving east, the classic, the quintessentially popular domain of protest, expression of popular protest just disappears, period, point. Why? The battle's been won. The merchants, the police, the gendarmes, the troops, they're already there. Beginning again west to Eastern Europe, you've got the depopulation of marginal rural property, marginal rural lands. People can't make it anymore producing little bits of this and that and they plunge themselves into the ever-increasing urban world in order to find work. And, so, if you look at what people protest over, we can see this big economic change. The nineteenth century just transforms the way people live. This is for sure. The nineteenth century didn't invent consumer culture. We already know, Jan deVries has just published within the last month or two just a brilliant book showing that ordinary families made all sorts of sacrifices to try to improve their lives beginning the middle of the seventeenth century, participating in this consumer culture, buying soap, buying forks, and that kind of thing. But these big-time economic changes, the nineteenth century is the crucial period in the whole thing. The disappearance of the grain riot as a form of popular protest is a fantastic demonstration of that fact. You don't want to complicate the thing or undermine the validity of what I've said by imagining, "Well, that's all pre-modern, this kind of protest. Then we've got modern protest and more strikes and all that." It's true that there are more strikes and strikes become another classic form of political protest, but the world of the nineteenth century was changing. The big losers in all of this are rural people, rural laborers, peasants who simply couldn't make a go of it and their world was transformed. That's part one of this trilogy. Secondly, let's look at the Swing Movement. These next two things I'm going to talk about take place really at the same time. That's not a coincidence. It's not a coincidence at all. The

first story is that of Captain Swing. I alluded to this the very first day, those of you who were here. It was in 1829-30. Those are the big years. The Demoiselles of the Arige comes at just the same time. They are similar and fascinating. I think they're fascinating. I hope you will, too. They have so much in common with each other and with what I've just been talking about. It's not about winners and losers in the brave new economy of high-powered capitalism and all its incarnations in Europe, big and small. We see the faces, the remainders of this kind of economic change. Again, the people who worked on Captain Swing were George Rud and Eric Hobsbawm. How do I put this? There was a real person called Ned Ludd in about 1816-17 in England. The English word Luddite is someone who's a machine breaker. Luddism is machine breaking. You break machines because machines are putting you out of work. You're a handloom weaver. There are famous cases in Silesia in Germany. Then machines for glassworks and then later in the century, things I talked about last time, were putting them out of work. Ned Ludd busted up machines. He broke machines. 1829 was an awful economic year everywhere in Europe. A freezing winter and real hunger in Britain. That's my example. It's from Britain, from England specifically, from the south of England even more specifically. They found people who were starved to death in the fields with only dandelions in their stomachs with nothing else to eat. If you were a Frenchman, or a German, or a northern Italian, and you went to England in 1829 or 1830, if you did the reverse of the Arthur Young track--Arthur Young was always wandering through France and discovering people he thought were sixty-five or seventy. It turned out they were twenty-nine. They were so battered and beaten down by hardship. There's famous case of a woman he met in Champagne near Reims of that case. Arthur Young saw all of these peasants in Europe, but the counterpart of Arthur Young, people from the continent going to England, were amazed. There weren't any more peasants, virtually no peasants. You'd find a peasant as a small property owner existentially committed to the land, that's a little bit overly fancy, but dependent upon a lopin de terre, a small piece of land, for family survival, the household economy. There weren't any more peasants left in England. There were gentry, including big property owners who were masters of all that they saw before them, in the portraits they had painted of themselves. You had gentry. You had yeomen who were sort of smaller versions of gentry. You had middle-rank property owners and this sort of thing. You had wealthy people from the city wanting to live in an aristocratic way buying as much land as they could take.

There was no place in Europe in which such a small percentage of the population owned so much of the land. That's still true today in Britain. But there weren't any peasants. Why? Because the big fish had eaten the smaller fish. And because, beginning in the sixteenth century, the enclosure movement, which you've read about, I think, meant that basically, no surprise, the big guys get the law on their side. Parliament passes thousands of acts of enclosure which allow people to enclose and divide up the common land. The big fish eat the smaller fish and the peasantry is basically destroyed. What you have, as I said before in another context, in England, is you've got all sorts of textile workers. You've got all sorts of governesses and domestic workers, and you have hundreds of thousands, millions of agricultural laborers. You have agricultural laborers in other countries, too. But you also have small property owners. There's hardly any of those folks left in England. To return to the story, in 1829 ordinary people start participating in protest and collective action. They start threatening, and smashing, and burning threshing machines. Why threshing machines? Because threshing machines are taking their work. The way they survive is during harvest they go from place to place working, the way people still do in the wine harvest in the south of France, working from place to place bringing in the harvest, prosperous agricultural land in the south of England. This is how they get by. They don't live very well. They don't do very well, but they're lodged. They're fed. They have a crummy place to sleep, but they can do okay. Then the big guys, the big farmers start buying threshing machines. The threshing machines do the work of these people. Next time they guys come along in groups of ten, twenty, thirty, families, pals, friends, they come around and say, "It's harvest time. Here we are. Nous voil." "Sorry, ol' chap. We don't need you. Maybe a couple of you, but we don't need you. We've got these machines. They do the job that you used to do. We don't have a problem with them working hard all the time. The machines work all the time at our command. See ya!" Are they mad? They're furious. They start burning these machines. They start smashing down the gates and going in and burning these machines. Then they started to find posters that had been written, scrawled posters, sometimes barely literate, because this wasn't a literate population. They begin to talk about a mythical-like figure like Ned Ludd, except this wasn't a real one. My favorite--I had this former girlfriend a long time ago at Mighty Michigan, and we were going to write a screenplay about this. We never did. One of them said, they all said, "If you don't get rid of the threshing machine, your agony will begin. We will destroy your machines. We will burn you out." But the best that I ever saw was, "Revenge for thee is on the wing from thy determined Captain Swing." Who was Captain Swing? He was a sense of popular

justice. He was what used to be called the moral economy. He did not exist. He should have. He still should exist. He did not exist. But Captain Swing gave this kind of paramilitary sense to "We are many. We are correct. We are right. We have God on our side. We are organized. We will win." The subtext is that "Maybe we better negotiate and see. Maybe you keep a few machines around, but we want our jobs back." Captain Swing was everywhere. He was in Kent. He was in Cambridgeshire. He was in Devon. He was in Wiltshire. He didn't exist, but he was everywhere, at least in the popular imagination. By the way, the Captain Swing folks had some allies. They were the smaller farmers who couldn't afford the big-time threshing machines, and they thought, "Maybe if they burn the machines of my ravenous neighbor, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world." So, they get moral support from folks like that. They spread. They're in all sorts of places. Do they win? Are you kidding? They lose. The sheriff comes in a country that only had a police force starting in 1829 in London, that didn't like the idea of uniformed armies. That was something the French and the Spanish had. They bring their military contingents and they beat the hell out of these people. They put them on trial. They hang some of them, not all that many. They sent lots of them to Tasmania or to Australia. "We all live in a convict colony," as they sometimes sing in Australia whenever they play the "poms," as they sometimes call the British. They send them a long, long way and they defeat them. It's bitter hard to write the history of remainders. It's fun, though, too. It's fun. Captain Swing disappears. The big guys win. Enclosure keeps rolling along. Tens of thousands of people are on the road. Oh, they get a little victory. The poor law of 1832 was probably influenced by this perceived threat of popular people voting with their feet, threatening but also negotiating, cajoling, trying to imagine a time in the past when everybody had a shot at doing well enough. The same thing as the grain riots, imagining a time when there was a just price for everything. Captain Swing was really part of that. Obviously, I find what they did thrilling, but I probably shouldn't say that. And, of course, they probably had a lot of time to think about what they did on that extraordinarily long trip to Port Arthur, not the Port Arthur in Asia, but the Port Arthur in Tasmania, or to what would become New South Wales or Victoria in Australia. But Captain Swing disappears. He never existed, but he sure should have. A long time ago, when I was starting out, I was working in the archives in Vincennes on the edge of Paris, the military archives in the big Chateau de Vincennes. I was working on other stuff and I kept finding these incidents that were occurring at precisely the same time as Captain Swing, 1829-30, not in England but in France. I kept finding these reports from a part

of--I didn't bring a map and I can't draw worth a damn either. Imagine la belle France. Nice, huh? Mountains. Toulouse here. Bordeaux down here, voil. I kept finding in a department called the Arige, the mountainous department, I kept finding these reports. The capital is Foix, but that's in the plain, kind of. Then you go up in the mountains. You've got real serious mountains. Now people drive through those mountains to get to Andorra, to buy cheaper pastis, and cigarettes, and that kind of thing. It's very beautiful there. It's also full now of people from 1968 who went off and formed communes in the Arige. Sometimes you'll see some of them staggering around there. I kept finding reports from the police or from the gendarmes, above all, or from mayors saying that men dressed as women were coming down the mountain in the mists, and fog, and snow, armed with pitchforks, armed with rifles and were chasing away two groups of people: charbonniers, charcoal burners--forest people cutting down trees--and forest guards--those people guarding the forests employed by the state, employed by the rural bourgeoisie, or people living in Foix or Toulouse who owned a lot of land in the forest, or by communes if the forests were communally owned to try to keep out ordinary people. These people were coming down the mountain and taking shots at them and yelling nasty things to them, threatening them with pitchforks and trying to drive them away. And then, they would find notes saying, "If the forest guards and the charcoal burners come back, your agony will begin. Signed Jean, Lieutenant of the Demoiselles." A demoiselle in French is obviously a young woman. These became known as the Demoiselles of the Arige. I found so many of these in 1829, 1830, 1831, a few in 1848, a couple in 1872, and never again. Who were these people and what were they doing? What they wanted, again think of Captain Swing and think of the grain riots, what they wanted was access to the forest. They'd always had access to the forest. It's cold in the Arige. You need wood that's gleaned from the forest to make fire to stay alive. You need berries, roots to eat. You need places to pasture your animals, pigs which eat right down through the root, goats like we have in our village in Ardche, or sheep. If they're really rich maybe cows, but that didn't happen very much there. The rich guys owned the cows. The peasants didn't own the cows. They'd always, for centuries as they well remembered, had access to the forest. Why did they lose access to the forests? They're looking back at an imaginary time. It wasn't imaginary. They always had had access. There was lots of forest--the whole place. Deforestation is a big problem in France since the seventeenth and eighteenth century. But the Pyrenees have many forests, many mountains. They'd always been able to go there as they wanted. They didn't own the forest, but use and property were not categories that meant

anything to anyone. They're told they can't go there anymore. Some of them go to churches and they're looking for deeds that would have given people of those villages rights to be in the forest centuries ago. No. They don't find them. So, why can't they go in the forest anymore to pasture their miserable animals or to find something to eat or some fuel? Why can't they do that anymore? Aha! We're talking capitalism in the state. The price of wood has increased. Why? The metallurgical industry, what they call Catalan, as in Catalonia, forges small metallurgical industries. The price of wood goes up. Suddenly the people that own the forest say, "Hey baby, we don't want those peasants and their animals in the forest anymore." They start hiring forest guards. They start hiring charcoal burners, the charbonniers, who are chopping down the trees, slicing them up, as people still do in the Jura, or in the Black Forest, or do anywhere that you can think of in Europe. In Oregon, where I'm from, logging was a good way to make money. I never did it, but when you're in college. And, so, the wood is leaving the forests. People are getting even richer and the peasants are out of luck. Why are they out of luck? Because what the big-money people do that own the forest is they do exactly what the wealthy did in England, the big landowners. They get the law on their side. What a surprise. They have their lobbyists. They get the law on their side. They pass a new forest code in 1827 that keeps ordinary people out of the forests to which they had always had access. They always had access. They can't go there anymore. They go up there and they find armed guards there. They are many and the guards are few and they scare the hell out of them and they drive them away. The mayors of these little villages, Massat--I love to go there. I've written about it. Massat was one of the mayors. He's in a difficult position. He knows damn well who is causing the troubles, les troubles, in the forests, but he's got to live with these people. He isn't going to be telling on anybody. I followed this through. I read this and wrote something about it in a book I did a long time ago called 1830 in France, an edited book. So, what happens? Who is Jeanne, Lieutenant of the Demoiselles? Jeanne. Who is she? She didn't exist either. She's exactly like Captain Swing. She says, "We are many. We are right. We have justice on our side." By the way, these people did not speak French. It was hard for them to find somebody to write in French "Your agony will begin," because they don't speak French. They spoke a patois that's very much influenced by Spanish that's not even really like Catalan and certainly nothing to do with Basque. It doesn't have anything to do with anything except vaguely Hungarian and Finnish. They write these things and they said that Jeanne, the Lieutenant of

the Demoiselles will toast you one day if you don't leave the forests. What they want is they want the government to restore their rights in the forest. Does the government do that? Are you kidding? Of course they don't. Now, 1830 comes along, "revolution, liberty, fraternity, equality, red, white, and blue." What do they do? They say, "Well, this liberty must mean that we can have our forests back, doesn't it?" One of the interesting things about this is they become petitioners just for a little bit. They get people who can write French to petition saying, "We hear about this liberty in Paris. That surely is our forests, isn't it?" Un-uh. The government says, "Oh, no. The Forest Code of 1827 is evermore in use and you can't have access to the forest." The forest guards return. The forest guards return to the forest, but so do the demoiselles. They begin to dress up as women again. They lose. What a surprise. They're driven away. Why do they dress up as women? One thing they do, mocking the charcoal workers also, they put charcoal on their face and they wear sheets. They try to make them look like dresses. Why as women? It's more than a disguise. What it is is an enraged carnival. If you think of carnival, think of Mardi Gras, anywhere in Christian Europe, what you do during carnival, look at the floats in New Orleans when everybody's getting wasted and dressing up in various things. The old version of that was that you dressed up like you're exploiters. The three or four days you could mock the judge who handed out unfair sentences. You could mock the big fat noble who had seigneurial rights over you. You could mock the gendarmes, who you thought treated you badly. You could pretend. It was a carnival, but an enraged carnival. During carnival you stand the world on its head. What you did in this case is you dressed up as women, reversing reality from their point of view. This enraged carnival is intended, rather like the charivari, the shivaree in English, in which you pound on pots and pans outside the house of a couple or a woman, for example, who has married somebody from another village. You try to set things right again by pounding and calling attention to a misdeed that has violated the communal sense of justice. That's what these people are doing. They're saying, "Respect us. Respect justice." And, so, they're dressing up like women. They're standing the world on its head. It's an enraged, deadly serious carnival. They'll shoot at these people and beat the hell out of them when they catch them. So, Jean, the lieutenant of the demoiselles, represents justice and this kind of acting out of this enraged carnival. It's more than a disguise. But they don't win. Captain Swing doesn't win, either. They're arrested. They're put on trial. Some of them are put in jail. But in the end, they come back at the end of 1830, 1831, some in 1832, if I remember right, 1848 they're back,

1872, but then never again. The Arige as a department depopulates rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. These people can't make it in the forest anymore. They can't go into the forest anymore. They can't survive with their little plots of land. So, they bail out. They get out. Their great, great, great grandchildren, many of them work in the arospatiale, the aircraft factories in Toulouse, or go to Bordeaux, or go to Paris, or go to Agen, or end up somewhere else. The demoiselles, like Captain Swing, like these grain rioters in all of these countries, in Spain, in Britain, in Prussia, everywhere, these are the remnants of what people viewed as a traditional way of doing things that at least was infused with a sense of the proper, a sense of popular justice. The demoiselles tried to stand the world on its head during carnival, and tried to get people to do the right thing, to return the forests to them, to get the threshing machines the hell out of the big farms in Kent and other places, restore grain and bread to a reasonable price so everybody could have a shot at buying some. But in the end, they lose out to this dynamic duo, this more powerful duo, the state and capitalism. It's bitter hard to write the history of remainders.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 11 Transcript October 8, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today, what I want to do is talk about the revolutions of 1848. Read the chapter. It's not very long. I want to talk principally about why there was no revolution in Britain in 1848, since there were revolutions in France, in the Hapsburg domains of the Austrian empire, what would become in 1867 Austria-Hungary, in Prussia, in the Rhineland, and in Northern and Central Italy, but not in Britain. I want to talk about that. But before I do that, let's just think about revolution in general and how revolutions work. I'll mention this again when we get to the Russian revolution. If you think about what you know about the French Revolution in this context, hopefully it will make some sense. In the 1960s many social scientists, not all, believed that revolutions came when pressure builds up and you've got intellectuals bailing out, leaving the regime. Then you've got all this tension building up and then boom, you've got your basic revolution. But revolutions don't work like that. If you think about revolutions you know anything about, the Iranian revolution in 1979 would be a good example, or the revolutions we're going to talk about today a little bit, that you're reading about in 1848, or the French Revolution. What happens is that in the case of 1848, or in the case of the other ones that I've mentioned, is that there is a seizure of power by a group who have come together because they oppose the policies of the government in power. But it's at that point that you've got an increase in social and political tension. It's at that point that tension really increases and all sorts of interesting things begin to happen. In the case of 1917 in St. Petersburg, in February the bread lines are very long. There are not a lot of troops around. They're at the front. There are not a lot of police around. Suddenly, the

czarist regime is just sort of swept away, like that. It's at that point that things heat up. In 1917 things weren't any tenser than they were in 1916, and there are a lot of things happening vis-vis the war that helped people mobilize. Try to imagine a post-czarist world or a reformed czarist autocracy. In the case of 1848 you've got demonstrations in Paris. In February--it rains all the time in Paris in February. It's gray. People want electoral reform. Troops open up and shoot a bunch of people. The same thing happens in Berlin not long after that. At that point you've got the regime that's swept away. What's interesting about the revolutionary process is that after you've got this kind of basic, provisional government. In the case of all--what the constitutional monarchy in 1789 and 1790 becomes, and in the case of Kerensky's provisional government in 1917, and in the case of this kind of moderate republic in France, or in Germany, or in Austria, you've still got the monarchy, but you have all these contenders for power who are saying at that point, "We want to take advantage of the situation so that we will have a republic," or, in the case of France, "that women will have more rights," or "that workers will have more rights." In the case of the German states, people who want a unified Germany put forth their claims at that point. In the case of France, people want the monarchy, the Bourbons, that is the legitimists who were chased out in 1830. They want them back. They put in their claims. You've got your basic moderate republicans that are saying, "We want a moderate republic." In the case of Austria you've got all these Viennese students who want reforms. They want a progressive regime. It's at that point that this sort of social tension and political tension increases. What the revolutionary process does, and what's important about 1848, is that it brings, for the first time, lots more people into the political process. In the case of France, my friend Maurice Agulhon has called the "apprenticeship of the republic," that is 1848 to December 2, 1851 and really 1852. Because now you've got universal manhood suffrage. All men can vote. Lots of women want to vote, too. It's not a dominant course, but it's still important in Paris. So, you have a politicization of ordinary people. You have this in the German states. You have it in the Italian states as well, and you have it in Austria-Hungary. In the case of AustriaHungary, you've got Hungarians putting forth special claims within the Hapsburg domains, and the national question surfaces in central Europe and in Italy, where people can imagine a unified Italy, which would mean you have to get rid of the Austrians, basically. You can read about what happens subsequently. You have these people putting forth their claims. You have this remarkable politicization.

In the case of Paris, the barricades go up, which happened in February. Then the June Days follow, which is basically a sort of class war in which lots of people get killed and put in prison--massive unrest for three days in June 1848. That's a much more violent confrontation and telling confrontation than the initial revolutionary seizure of power by groups who don't necessarily agree on what's going to happen. In the case of France, which is the best documented, you've got all these newspapers that begin publishing because now suddenly you can publish things. You've got all these political clubs, just as in 1848. You've got neoJacobin clubs. You've got clubs of women. You've got the club of the two sexes, as it's called. This becomes a way of politicizing ordinary people. When men go to the polls in 1848 in April for the first time and they elect a relatively conservative, indeed monarchist leading national assembly, they do so with considerable knowledge about what they want. They want schoolteachers. They want credit available. They want the right to vote. This politicization, or the apprenticeship of a republic that would finally be permanent starting in the 1870s, is one of the most important aspects of the Revolution. The same thing is in the Russian Revolution, which I'll come back and talk about. You've got Mensheviks. You've got Bolsheviks. You've got socialist revolutionaries. These are three big radical groups. You've got constitutional democrats. You've got monarchists. You've got people who want the czar to have all the power that he had before, and to lop off the heads of those people who are against him and that kind of thing. In the case of the Russian Revolution, how you get from the February revolution to October, when the Bolsheviks seize power, is really very fascinating. That's just a way of thinking about revolution. You can think about other revolutions that you know. The point is that the revolution as a process brings into play the aspirations of a lot more people. The French case, which is fascinating, is what begins as this kind of urban, middle-class revolution of people fought by artisans, as usual, who want the right to vote, ends up in December 1851, after Napoleon's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become the good old Napoleon III, not so good old--he destroys the republic, where he completes a process of repression that he'd already, as president of France, elected on the 10th of December 1848, initiated. But that very ordinary people, peasants for the most part, but also rural artisans, particularly in the south and not necessarily speaking French, at all rise up to try to defend the republic or what they call la Belle, the beautiful one, against the rape, as they called it, by the repressive apparatus centered in Paris. This urban revolution ends up with over 100,000 people taking arms, and the largest national insurrection in France in the nineteenth century trying to defend the republic against its

abolition by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who would not be able to stand for a second term as president of the republic. That's really fascinating. A long time ago I used to read all these interrogations of people, including the great, great, great uncle of one of our neighbors in Ardche. It's being translated from Occitan, which is the language of that part of the south, into French by some translator as he's being interrogated. "When did you join the secret society?" "Who did you initiate into the secret society?" to defend the republic, the democratic and social republic that's going to provide more things to more people, etc. etc. Fascinating, the politicization of this. Now, in the case of Germany and of Italy, it's a different kind of revolution. It still had its kind of liberal and democratic component, but you had this scene, for example, in Frankfurt in the Frankfurt parliament, which was basically a lot of professors and lawyers debating long into the night in St. Paul's church. They imagine the unification of Germany, what they called then the "springtime of the peoples," that the German states, which Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Wurtemburg were the most important of these states. All these other little states, too, are going to be unified along liberal auspices. They were just dreaming. In the end they were kind of dismissed as a servant who was not wanting to be kept on at the big house anymore. They're sort of dismissed. But they debate far into the night. The significance of all of this is when you read the chapter--please do--on the Second Republic, and you see what happens in the case of the German states is that when Germany would be unified, and that unification is proclaimed in January 1871 in Versailles, in the Chateau of Versailles after the Franco-Prussian War, it would not be a liberal unification. It would not be a Germany united by lawyers and professors meeting in a Frankfurt church with what would become eventually the German flag, the colors of it hanging all around the rafters. It would be unified, as Bismarck accurately put it, "by blood and iron," in the context of the Prussian aristocracy, the nobles, the Junkers, a term you already know, J-U-N-K-E-RS, or Prussian nobles, and that basically unified Germany would be, as some wag once put it, "an army with a state trailing behind it." Germany would not be a republic; it would be an empire. Because one of the things that happens with empires is that emperors can do whatever they damn well please, just as czars can, and you might have had an assembly called the Reichstag, in which socialists became the leaders or the most dominant numerically by 1914, but power rests in the hands of a thoroughly irresponsible, intellectually lazy, sort of madcap ridiculous guy who happens to be the Kaiser, William II. Over the long run, the costs to Europe of that fact would be, in retrospect, given what happens in the twentieth century, which is the one that follows the

nineteenth, would be one thing that historians would go back and say very obvious things, sort of clichs like, "Well, in 1848 history in Germany reached its turning point and failed to turn." That German unification would not come because of professors, and liberals, and merchants in Hamburg, and this sort of thing, and that the German middle classes would, in a way, abdicate their political responsibility and not having much political power, and the state would be run by a bunch of Junkers, military officers with dueling scars and veterans of the fraternities of the Prussian universities. Prussia wasn't just Pomerania and Brandenburg and the marshes of northeastern Europe. Prussia also controlled the Rhineland. But the kind of magnates of industrializing Prussia were not going to be the ones who were running the show. In the case of Italy, you can read about that, too, is that there were a lot of people running around saying, "Long live united Italy," and all of this business, but that was to be very hard, too. In order to unify Italy under any auspices, and most people wanted under liberal auspices, you have to get rid of whom? You have to get rid of the Austrians. The Austrians control almost all of northern Italy and much of central Italy, too. There are lots of impediments to Italian unification, not the least of which was the fact that the vast majority of people in Italy did not speak Italian. That itself was not a major impediment, but I guess it was, too. Only about four or five percent of the people in Italy spoke what now is considered to be Italian, which I guess is--I don't speak Italian--essentially the language of Tuscany, the area around Florence. They spoke all sorts of other dialects. The Tuscan language was virtually unknown in the south of Italy or in Sicily, and was identified with money-grubbing tax collectors coming down from the north. After the tide of the springtime of the people or, as somebody once called it, "the great illusion" of 1848, after that tide had passed, what you had is still lots of fervent hopes and dreams that Italy was going to be unified along liberal auspices. That is what happens, even though it's a monarchy, and unification comes because of basically the expansion of the state of Piedmont Sardinia, which was that most influenced by the French wave in the times of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, and also the wealthiest part of Italy. In the case of Austria-Hungary--this is a long story, and you can read about it--but the springtime of the peoples meant the dreams first of number of nationalities, and I'll talk about nationalism in a week or two, who suddenly think that now they, too, will have their time. A bunch of Czech nationalists were sitting in a room rather like this. Somebody looked up and said, "Geez, if this ceiling collapsed, that's the end of the Czech national movement." There was something to that. The springtime of the peoples would not bring an independent Czech

state. It wouldn't bring Czechoslovakia, which only lasts until 1993, despite what John McCain thinks. It doesn't come until 1918, after World War I. But in the Austrian-Hungarian empire everybody says, "What if we have an independent Galicia?" "What if Poland is independent and the parts of Russia and Austria and Poland will be independent?" But these are pipe dreams. National awareness and great power politics will mean that this isn't going to happen until later. Poland becomes independent in 1918, for reasons that you already know. The chill of reaction, revolution, reaction, repression is what really happens. That's the theme running through the whole thing, besides the big hopes of the spring of 1848. The Austrian imperial system, and I'll come back and talk about Austria-Hungary quite a bit, run in German in the polyglot Austrian-Hungarian empire, where there at least fifteen major languages, will be the story of Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. Of course, the Hungarians get separate status, equal status in principle, as of 1867. One of the interesting things about the Austrian-Hungarian period is that it's in 1848 that Franz Joseph becomes emperor of AustriaHungary. He is in power until 1916. He is around even longer than Queen Victoria. The world changes in such dramatic ways between 1848 and 1916. When I was younger than you, I was in Vienna for the first time and I was sitting in a coffee shop, as one does there, in a caf. This very old man started talking to me. He had actually seen, when he was young, had seen Franz Joseph. That was the most amazing thing for me to actually meet somebody who had seen, when he was a boy, Franz Joseph. That's just extraordinary continuity. Anyway, Austria-Hungary is another story and it's an interesting one. That we're going to come back to, but I can't do that now. We've got to go back to the question of England. Another of the legacies of this is that after this tide of reaction what it does is it sends waves of political refugees to places like this. Not New Haven so much, but yeah, there were some Italians who ended up in New Haven who were Italian political refugees in that period. But lots of Germans who were thrown of the German states and had better not come back; they end up where? They end up in Philadelphia or in New York. Lots of Irish, who I'm going to talk about in a minute, end up in obvious places--Boston, New York, those two above all, but also Philadelphia. The glacial wave of repression sends these people, a lot of them, to the United States. That itself is an interesting story. Although the revolutions of 1848 failed--and you should read about that, please do; I love this stuff, talking about this--the political legacies that they left are extremely important. These demands for political rights would be something that would last for a very long time. Again,

to repeat and to end this little part of what we're doing--oh my goodness--that German unification would come under very different auspices than that of the revolutionaries of 1848, what they wanted. The King of Prussia rejects this crown offered from the gutter, as he called it, to unify Germany under liberal monarchical auspices. That ain't gonna happen and it doesn't. Okay. There's revolution in all these places in 1848. The big wave. Why not in Britain? Why not? You probably already know some of the answers. There are really two major contexts in all of this. First is that the Reform Act of 1832 puts down the drawbridge and opens it to more voters. More people can vote now. Again, voting was based on property qualification. Feargus O'Connor, who is an Irish Chartist whom I'll talk about in a minute, he didn't even have the right to--he is not disbarred, but he's thrown out of parliament because he doesn't make enough money in order to actually qualify to vote himself. You could vote if you paid X number of pounds and shillings in taxes. What happens is 1832 opens up the drawbridge and more people can vote. The political arena expands a little bit and the same thing happens in France in 1830, as you know. In France the revolution of 1830 doubled the number of people that could vote. But it still leaves people on the outside looking in. In 1867 they would pass a second reform bill that lets more people in. In 1884 they pass another one that lets almost everybody in except for, I think, domestic servants and maybe rural proletarians. I can't remember exactly. The political arena is expanding. The point of this is it's expanding through reform. Britain reforms. The selfimage, the self-identity of the freeborn Englishman, tracing more or less, at least in the imaginary, antecedents back to June 15, 1215 at Runnymede near London. The idea that the freeborn Englishman has rights and that we British citizens, our identity is we reform. We don't rebel. Clearly, as I will demonstrate in a minute drawing on the work of John Belcher and other people, too, what happens in 1848 is when there might have been a revolutionary moment in Britain, "France has sneezed and Europe is catching a cold," as they like to say over and over again. It doesn't come to Britain. British national identity, like all national identities, have to be systematically reinvented and reconstructed. This happens in 1848 and subsequent years as well, the sense that we are respectable. I've written "respectability" up on the board. Respectability means reform and not revolution. The aristocracy of labor, who were craftsmen and artisans who could be seen walking through Hyde Park with their ladies on their arms wearing suits, of all things, on Sundays, the bourgeois respectability had a political aspect of it, too.

In 1848 Britain does not rebel. More about this in a minute. The other context is Chartism, which you should read about. Chartist campaigns were campaigns to get ordinary people to sign an enormous charter with millions and millions of names. There's two big waves in the 1830s and 1840s. What they do is they sign and they say, "We the humble poor, we ordinary people, we entreat you, big time lords, property owners of great distinction who are representing property and parliament, we entreat you to give us political rights." They bring these huge petitions in on wagons signed by zillions of people, many of whom can only mark an X instead of writing their names. They bring them to parliament in the rain, as always. Parliament says, "Gee, thanks a lot. We don't want to see that." Then they say, "Oh, we'll do it again. O great lords, give us political rights." They sign. They don't pick up their blunderbusses, they sign. In 1830 the French middle class was more than happy to turn their artisans loose on the street to fight their battles for them for political reform. In Delacroix's famous painting, Liberty Leads the People, the bourgeois with his top hat, in this romantic picture romanticized view of revolution, does not have any place there, because the bourgeoisie does not fight, unless you consider master artisans petty bourgeois. But in England that's never going to happen. The Chartist campaign remains respectable. It is class-based to the extent that most people who signed the chartist petitions are ordinary people. But really they saw themselves as moral reformers. They see themselves as trying to do--and it cuts across class lines. They're trying to get the government to do the right thing, to pass more reforms. The Reform Act of 1832 was passed by a conservative government because they knew that inevitably it was going to have to be passed. Who knows? It would create more lords in order to--and you'd have these not real lords who are there so the bill gets passed. It's passed by a conservative government. Then everybody says, "We British, we reform. We've opened up the drawbridge. More people can vote." There was a component of Chartists who were called "physical force" Chartists. They're not so sure that reform without revolution is possible. They are a minority within the Chartist movement. They are a very small minority, the physical force Chartists. What you've got in 1848 is you've got two things that are going on. First of all, you don't have a revolution. There's this big date in April, I think it's April 10th, where there's going to be this huge march in London. What the government does is it deputizes 25,000 men of property. They become sheriffs. They become--I don't know what you call them, sheriffs, I guess. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had not yet returned to France, he was one of those who was actually deputized as a sheriff. The business people in the City, which is what the financial

capital that overlooks the British Empire was increasingly called, they come with their hunting rifles to work. They get those file cabinets ready to barricade the door. And with their rifles they're going to blow apart anybody who rises up and would try to bring revolution to Britain. There are 25,000 of these people. The number of marchers was far, far smaller to that. It's a very peaceful march. There is no revolution in Britain in 1848. But if there had been a revolution, where would it come from? From where would the revolutionary ranks have come? That is the interesting question. That's by far the most interesting question in all of this. Because of what I said before, 1848 helps the British re-invent or reconfigure, reconstruct their identity. There has to be an unwanted Other there who's frightening them, who makes them convinced even more that they're doing it the right way. I alluded before, when we talked about British identity in the eighteenth century, I said what the British weren't in the seventeenth century helped determine who they thought they were. What they weren't were absolutists. They reformed. What they weren't was Catholic. The biggest riots in the eighteenth century were the Gordon riots, which were anti-Catholic riots. They are not the French, not at all. France has a centralized state and France is full of Catholics. Many of the Protestants who had left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 come, not just to the Netherlands, but come to Britain as well. So, this may have already tipped you off on who is the unwanted, dangerous Other in the British--particularly upperclass, but not just upper-class--imaginary. They are the Irish. What happens in 1848 and the subsequent years is that British nationalism is redefined again or re-infused with a sense of "what we are not," and we are not Catholic and we are not Irish. If there was going to be a revolution in April or any other month in 1848, the components would be, from the point of view of the upper classes and from the police, the Irish and groups of physical force Chartists or revolutionaries who might join forces. Chartists looked to the Irish to get them to sign the big petitions. They see them as allies. Remember, because of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s that tens of thousands of Irishmen, hundreds of thousands of Irishmen--I have it in the book somewhere, but the number of people who leave Ireland in the 1840s is in the millions, along with all those who just simply die in the fields. They go to where? They go to the United States and they go to England, particularly Liverpool. That's why the Liverpool--this has nothing to do with anything, a na rien voir avec--soccer team is very much perceived as a Catholic team in the way that in Glasgow that the Celtics are the Catholic team, because so many Irish immigrants went to Glasgow and to Scotland. The Rangers are the Protestant team, very anti-Catholic. That's why

these people were brawling in 1900. They played before 100,000 people in 1900--one hundred thousand people at a soccer game in about 1900. They hate each other's guts and they still do. All of these Irish are going to London, also. They live in the Irish neighborhoods. From the point of view of the ruling classes, and from the point of view of British nationalism, and from the point of view of the police, the possibility was there that the Irish confederation, who are extremely militant--one of the important Irish leaders, Daniel O'Connell, who is in the book, he dies in 1847. But you've got these people who are far more militant. Many of them believe that the only way Ireland is ever going to be independent is by rising up and rebelling. That's what happens, isn't it? That's what eventually happens. They were right about that. What if they start rebelling in 1848? What if you had, for example, your basic Peterloo massacre, as they called it, playing on the word "Waterloo," where the British troops shoot down well-dressed demonstrators in Manchester. What is it, 1817? Either 1816 or 1817, I don't remember. What if people who said, "We're never going to get anywhere if we don't do what our French colleagues have done, and that is take arms against these people." So, there is a potential for an alliance between militants in the physical force Chartist movement, other radicals, and members of the Irish confederation. Because it never happens, there are a few marches and a few skirmishes, but basically the only news is no news, does not mean that this wouldn't have a big effect on the reinvention of British nationalism, British self-identity. What do I mean by that? Here, one of the interesting things is that John Belcher told me a long time ago, on a train in Germany coming back from a conference in Wurzburg, that there were more boxes of documents in the public record office about the surveillance of ships coming into the port of Liverpool, than there were any other documents about any other aspect of 1848. Why? What are they doing? Where is the potential insurgency or infusion of militants for Irish coming from? It's coming from the United States. One of the interesting things about this, and you can see also in the time of the troubles in the 1970s--I was in Ireland, ironically, when it all started up again in 1969. At the time they were really worried about the IRA, and there was a lot to worry about then. The IRA was getting all sorts of money from Irish pubs in New York and Boston, just tons of money, big bucks all the time to buy weapons. In 1848, one of the interesting things that Belcher and other people have discovered is that the real Irish militants, the most committed, were Irish immigrants, immigrants to and immigrants from Ireland living in Boston and New York. What they had done is taken the notion of "American liberty" and said, "All right. Our role will be that of the French Revolution, to

carry liberty in principle across the borders and free Europe from nobles, from priests, etc., etc. What we will do, as first generation Irish living in New York, and Philadelphia, and Boston, and maybe Connecticut, too, is we will raise money and we will make Irish independence. We will achieve this with violence, with guns." Every ship that came into any port that was coming from the United States was thoroughly searched for weapons and for money. These Irish immigrants to the United States were the most militant, arguably, within the Irish political movement for independence. For one thing, they had more means. Some of them had come from Ireland to the United States maybe going through England and maybe not. They had jobs, and the people in Ireland themselves were just starving. They were dying in the fields. They were ending up in London living with other Irishmen, which is not surprising, maintaining these kinds of patterns by county, Cork, and all this. The Catholic Church was terribly, terribly important in their lives. It was terribly important as a means of charity and all this. But what it meant for the upper classes is that the unwanted Other, Catholic--remember in 1798 they tried to ally with the French. What happens in World War I? Roger Casement, who is an Irish militant who is absolutely against the exploitation of workers in Peru, and in Africa, and in everywhere else, Roger Casement ends up being sent off with a little boat off of a submarine off the coast of Carey. He tries to stop the Easter Insurrection. Of course, he's arrested within about twenty-five minutes and hung later. What he tried to do was organize, in prisoner of war camps in Germany, Irish militants to fight the good fight and to free Ireland. This is looking later, but there was always this potential fear among the British upper classes that they--these Catholics who are no longer just across the channel. They're not over in Ireland across a very choppy, gray, freezing sea. They are living in Liverpool in huge numbers. They are living in London in even bigger numbers. They are there. They are dangerous. If they ally with these dissatisfied workers from the Chartist movement, all hell is going to break out. During the next time, and I don't have much time at all--and I didn't even use this, but you see the point. This potential alliance never occurs, but one of the interesting things about the reinvention or the reconstruction of British identity, self-identity--and it's one shared not just by nobles and big time gentry but by ordinary workers, "Tory workers," we tended to call them dismissively, those of us who couldn't stand Margaret Thatcher and always were amazed to go through working-class parts of Britain and see these miserable council houses with these big pictures of Margaret Thatcher or the royal family. Anyway, it's just amazing. But these Tory workers, and not just Tory workers, they see themselves as respectable. They see

themselves as British and they increasingly see this unwanted enemy within, Catholic enemy within, as the Irish. The newspapers are full of cartoons and caricatures of the Irish, who are portrayed invariably as drunken, as stupid, and as lazy. "Paddy" becomes, for the caricaturists in British newspapers in 1848 and subsequent years--Paddy is portrayed as the unwanted Other who is a threat to and has no place being in, except to do menial jobs or as a factory operative if they maintained respectability and don't try trod out their Irishness too much. So, if anyone wants to know why these issues become so extraordinarily bitter at almost any time you can think of, Ulster in the 1970s and 1980s or even into the 1990s, or Ireland in 1916, 1848 plays a major role in that. Now, this is not to say that all people who saw themselves as British were necessarily nasty, aggressive people. But it does simply remind us, and here again I counsel Linda Colley's book called Britain, as a very eloquent summary of all of this, that part of the construction of any kind of identity, and I'll talk more about this when I talk about Eastern and Central Europe, is what you're not, and what you're not for the British in 1848--afraid of catching this cold coming from the continent was, again, you are not French. You are not Catholic. This, if anything, was going to further sour the relations between Irish and British authorities, particularly given the fact that the British Protestants owned the land in Ireland. I was in New York the other day, and I heard a talk and I saw some pictures of these marvelous things called "mass slabs," or "mass rocks," that were in rural Ireland, where priests in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries said mass in secret using these slab rocks, rocks that they happened to find, as altars. Practicing your religion was illegal, and the Protestants have the law on their side and they own the land anyway. So, in 1848 there was no revolution in Britain. You know clearly why this is not the case. It's almost surprising to think that they could have imagined the lines between the Irish confederation and other Irish groups and physical force Chartists. But 1848 has another role to play in British identity. I've tried to convey that to you today. Have a wonderful weekend. See you on Monday. Bye.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 12 Transcript October 13, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today, I want to do the impossible and talk about urbanization and urban growth in fifty minutes. It builds on what you're reading and I'll give the classic example, which is the greatest project of human intervention or rebuilding, that is the rebuilding of Paris by that man that my late friend, Richard Cobb, once dissed as the "Alsacian Attila." In doing so, I want to emphasize a couple points. One is that the nineteenth century was a period of phenomenal urban growth and urbanization. I will distinguish those in a minute. Secondly, one of the things that emerges out of this urban growth and urbanization, but particularly the growth of cities large and medium in the nineteenth century, is an increasing geography of class segregation. The theme of course in Paris, as in other cities--London is a good example--is a more prosperous west and an increasingly less prosperous east. Also, one of the things that I really enjoy talking about in trying to help people understand is why it is that European suburbs are not at all like American suburbs. Why is it that some people feared by elites were perched on the edge of European cities, whether it's Vienna, Paris, or lots of other places, and not in the center; whereas, in the United States, if you think of the riots in 1967, before most of your times, in Detroit, or Newark, or Watts, or East L.A., it was people in the center with the

wealthy people in the periphery fearing the poor people living in the center. Why is it just completely different? I remember in the early 1990s we were doing a book, just a bunch of essays in France, called Banlieues Rouges, which means the red suburbs. I was supposed to write something tying the book together. It was at the time of the Rodney King trial. Most of you are--not of the trial of Rodney King, but when Rodney King, who was an Afro-American who was beaten up by cops in L.A. It was filmed by somebody who just happened to have a camera and was filming this. There was a big trial. The police who beat the hell out of him were acquitted. They were acquitted by a white jury in the suburbs. People in France couldn't get over that, the idea of wealthy people living in the suburbs as opposed to poor people living in the suburbs in Europe. We had to hold the book for a couple weeks until I could figure out how to explain this. That's one theme also under the rubric of center and periphery. Why are European cities different? Human intervention has something to do with that in the case of Paris. That's fun to talk about, so I'm going to do that in the last half of the talk. Just a few points at the beginning. I sent around, I hope it will reach you, something I sent out on October 16 on this class server, which has most of these terms on the board. The nineteenth century is a period of both urban growth and urbanization. Why are those different? Urban growth is, say, a population of any city--the population of Vienna rises from, say, 500,000 to 1,000,000. I don't remember the statistics. That is urban growth. Vienna is bigger at the end of the nineteenth century than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or any place you want to pick. But the most important point is that there is urbanization in the nineteenth century. You could have urban growth absolutely and deurbanization if, at the end of any period that you're looking at, you had more people living in cities, but they represented a smaller percentage of the population. You could actually have de-urbanization if you had more people living in the countryside at the end of the period, relative to those living in the cities. So, it depends on how you define what an urban area is. In the case of France, where they have all these great censuses all the time, in the Restoration, that is 1815-1830, a city had 1,500 people in it. There's that many people lined up at the Milford Mall when it opens in this country. In 1841 they start using 2,000 people agglomerated, that is, living in an urban--the church, the steeple. Open up the church and look at all the people or whatever. You know what I mean. That's an urban area. In the United States, I have no idea. A city used to be 5,000. I think it may be 25,000 or something like that. It doesn't matter. Depending on what you define as urban, there's a remarkable increase in the urban population in the nineteenth century.

It's not just big, huge cities like Naples, or Constantinople, or London, which is so enormous compared to Paris, compared to any city spatially. But it's also small towns that increase in size because of industrial, commercial, administrative functions. All this is perfectly obvious. The nineteenth century is the growth of big, big cities and the first conurbations, that is, cities that just run into each other, such as now for example Boston to Washington is practically a conurbation. In France it would be Lille, Tourcoing, Roubaix. In the north of England it would be Manchester and its expanding suburbs. That's all perfectly obvious. The next step is to say, "Where does the population of cities come from, and who are all these people that are increasing the population of cities and are part of this process, in a statistical sense, of urban growth?" The second point that I'll make is what people thought about this. What did they think about these teeming cities? "Teeming" was a word that they started to use to describe these cities that seemed to be kind of runaway cities. First of all, I'm not going to write this on the board, despite the fact it's the only mathematical formula that I even know. If you were trying to explain the growth of any city from Point 1 in time to Point 2 in time, what you do is simply look at the population at Point 1 in time, say 1811 or something like that. Then you try to find out where the population came from that increased it to Point 2 in time, if the city reclassified what was considered urban, if they annexed its suburbs. That's what Lyons does in 1852, or Paris does in 1860 on January 1, or almost anywhere they do this. That would be one factor. Then you would have births minus deaths. Do you have a natural increase in population? The other thing is in versus out migration. Do you have more people arriving in the city than leaving it? There are people leaving and people arriving all the time. But if you look at particularly the first half of the nineteenth century, to make a generalization, more people die in cities than are born there, because cities are very unhealthy places, which helps create this kind of image of biological sickness that I'll discuss in a minute, that I'll evoke with some conservative commentators from those times. What do I mean by that? The average life expectancy in Manchester, counting infant mortality, so it's a little bit exaggerated, was about nineteen years old. You guys would have about had it. Lille, in the north of France, is the same thing. That's pretty young. But that counts life expectancy. If you made it to the ripe old age of eighteen, then your chances of living longer were pretty gray. You still had places where you have phenomenal, still cases particularly in areas where you have all these spinsters in Brittany and in Ireland, of old women who live a very long time. Women lived and still live longer than men. Another reason why you have more people dying in cities, among other reasons, is infanticide. Foundling homes in these big cities. You name the big city--Rome, Berlin, anywhere you want, St. Petersburg, Moscow--they have

huge foundling homes with thousands and thousands of babies abandoned every year. Onethird of those babies die before the end of the next year. Infanticide. The church, which obviously opposes infanticide and obviously opposes abortion in the nineteenth century, what they do is they finally agree to put in these little things called tours, T-O-U-R-S. It's an awful example to give and it comes out of an institution that no longer exists, Machine City, but anyplace that you have those kind of machines and you put money in and you hope that the window is going to turn around and actually give you your M&Ms. To make a crass example, that's what these tours were. They encouraged young women, usually unmarried or uncoupled women, to abandon their babies instead of exposing them and having them die. You put your baby in the foundling homes. You ring the bell, you put the baby in this little thing that turns around and then the good sister comes and takes the baby to the foundling home. If all goes well, the baby will be there in a year, but one-third of them are not there in a year. You've got a lot of babies who die. This increases the mortality rate. Then you've also got a lot of old people who come into the cities--and young people--to beg, seeking those last vestiges of charity, who are clutching at passersby as they go to church, and who some people give them money and most of the people don't give them money. Often they form part of the community, which is obviously the case here at Yale. A lot of the older people die. Policemen going on their rounds in any city, Milan, or Turin, or anywhere, are going to find dead people the next morning. You've got more people that die in cities than are born there, really, in most places way into the nineteenth century. The point is obviously that it's immigration that causes urbanization and urban growth. Massive immigration, usually from the hinterland, that is the region around cities. In the case of Berlin, northern Germans from Brandenburg or Pomerania and many Poles were moving into Berlin. There were very poor people moving into Berlin. In the case of Paris, people who come into Paris are from Normandy, or from Champagne, or from central France where a lot of them are seasonal migrants and they ended up living there permanently. In the 1880s you've got a huge wave of Bretons from Brittany who don't speak French. If you go to the station of Montparnasse, you'll see a lot of the cafes around Montparnasse are named after Breton towns--" la ville de Saint-Brieuc," la ville de Dinon. Still today at that station, Montparnasse, the first thing you see when you get off a train there is a sign for public assistance for Bretons. It's in the station at Montparnasse. The population in Marseilles includes lots of people from the south of France, from Provence, but also Italians. This is very obvious. People who move into Barcelona are far more likely to

be Catalan than they are to be Galician, or Castilian or something. This is all obvious. There's no surprises there. The image that people had of this rapid migration into cities of poor people. The majority of people who moved to these cities are poorer than the people who are already there. In the case of the 1950s and 1960s, in most of the cities it's not the case. The 1950s and 1960s they were young professional couples who get enough money to come to rent an apartment in London, good luck, or to buy an apartment in London, or in Berlin, or someplace else, or Munich. In the nineteenth century you have waves of poor people. The kinds of people you've seen before who are coming to work as domestic servants, coming to work as day laborers. In the case of London, coming to work on the teeming--there's that word again--docks of the Thames River, as London is that imperial city looking out on its vast empire. The interesting thing about London, I wish we had days to talk about this stuff, but it's really only in London that you had people of color. You could find them already by the end of the nineteenthcentury, people coming from India, from what would become Pakistan, people coming from the Caribbean. In other cities, you simply didn't have that. The number of North Africans coming to Paris is merely a trickle really until after World War I. Anyway, contemporaries had the idea that what this whole process was, and I should have written this on the board, but you can write it down if you would please, called the uprooting hypothesis. They didn't call it that. That's social science from the 1960s. These people were uprooted from their steady, rural roots of organized religion and from family support and they are thrown into the maelstrom, into the chaos--sometimes a creative chaos, but nonetheless, the perception was a dangerous chaos that was urban life. The result of all of this was that revolution becomes seen as an extension of purse snatching. In fact, some of the bad social science from the 1960s in trying to explain the riots in Detroit and places like that said, "Well, you've got a lot of poor people coming from Alabama and Arkansas," which is certainly the case, "or from South and North Carolina move up to Detroit and try to get a job in the factories there. They get to Detroit and they just freak out, because those rural roots have been cut." You still see this in various electoral campaigns even today, even as I speak, this idea that cosmopolitanism, which is also by the way in almost every language sort of a code word for anti-Semitism. When people say, "Cities are so cosmopolitan," they meant they are full of Jews. This is particularly true in this sort of anti-Semitism and racism of eastern and central Europe where you had such a large Jewish population living in cities like Prague, Budapest, Vilnius, Riga, just about anywhere you could name. With the kind of increase in ethnic populations with the

Estonization of Tallinn or the Czechization of Prague, you had fewer Germans and fewer Jews living in those cities, but you had this sort of anti-Semitic discourse that lingers. Vienna is the classic case. Vienna goes from being sort of a liberal city in the 1850s and 1860s to sort of a hotbed of anti-Semitism, where the mayor of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, a buffoon called Carl Lueger, says, "I say who's a Jew." That's one of his more infamous statements. "I declare who's a Jew and who isn't." Of course, one wants to understand how Adolf Hitler got his anti-Semitism. It really comes from World War I, but the basis was already laid there by growing up in Austria in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. If you think about that, does this massive immigration necessarily lead to urban chaos? The answer is obviously not. We have the effect that now we know a lot about, historians, and social scientists, and social geographers, and sociologists, which is called chain migration. Take the case of China. People who have studied Beijing discovered a long time ago, I remember this from days when I was studying Chinese history back at Michigan, and all these people pouring into Beijing in the nineteenth century. They formed native places associations. It's obvious. You get together with people that you know from your part of China. They are sort of the intermediaries between you and the city. The Irish are a classic case. We've already seen how the British elite are scared the hell out of the Irish, of the Irish, because they're Catholic and all that. They don't just pour into Manchester, Liverpool, and London and freak out. It doesn't work like that at all. They live with their families. Their families make a little money and say, "Why don't you come along?" It's the same thing. Look at the case of America, people coming to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century first of all massively from northern Italy and then in the twentieth century from southern Italy. They send money back all the time. It's very different than the Germans who came to the United States. They were almost never in contact with their families again, relatively, and the same with Swiss. But the Italians always stayed in contact. In any case, all these people, it's very sensible. If you come from California to Yale, there are a couple high schools in L.A. that send all of these students to Yale. If you're kind of freaking out when you get to Yale and saying, "All these people are all so smart," or whatever, then the next thing you do is you go to people that you wouldn't even say hello to in high school and say, "Why don't we hang out tonight," or something like that. You find people who have origins like you, geographic or whatever, and hang out with them. It's a logical thing. It happens every single time.

In the case of people moving to Paris, Limousins, people from the center part of France, Limousins, they live in certain neighborhoods around the center of Paris in the way that Bretons lived around what became the station of Montparnasse. This is chain migration. You see it in Philadelphia. You see it in London. You see it in Moscow. You see it in St. Petersburg. You see it everywhere. But, having said that, that's not the way contemporaries viewed this. Let me just give you a couple examples of how often well-meaning, but not always, contemporaries saw the phenomenon of urbanization and urban growth. These are taken from an excellent study by Andrew Lees. Let's listen to a preacher called James Shergold Boone, minister of St. John's church in the Paddington district of London. This is his sermon. When he's talking about cities, he's evoking Sodom and Gomorrah. "The very extent of edifices and the very collection of vast masses of human beings onto one spot, humanity remaining what it is (bad is what he means), must be fraught with moral infection." They continually use words like "infection," that there's a biological inequality of people with each other. The poor are biologically less likely to, in a world where Darwin and post-Darwin misuse of Darwin is very important, to survive the challenges of illness of disease. In illness, the cholera carries away poor people more than rich people. Going back to the good minister, Cities are the centers and theatres of human ambition, human cupidity, human pleasure. On the one side, the appetites, the passions, the carnal corruptions of man are forced in a hotbed into a rank and file luxuriance, and countless evils which would otherwise have a feeble and difficult existence are struck out into activity and warmth [this is biological contagion. This is a disease metaphor constantly] by mere contact with each other. On the other side, many constraints and safeguards are weakened or even withdrawn. This is what I mean by leaving those imaginary rural roots in which solidarity was considered to be automatic and family support so very, very important. He goes on. "In cities there is a complication of evils. External forces cooperate with inward desires." You can conquer those inward bad desires in the countryside, but all is lost in the demon rum of moral corruption. The reality is from urban life, etc., etc. Sir Charles Shaw, who was police chief of Manchester, described the residents of industrial cities. He called the residents of industrial cities such as his own as "the debris which the vast whirlpool of human affairs deposited here in one of its eddies, associated but not united, contiguous but not connected." That's a perfect description of the uprooting hypothesis. There's nothing you can do to save people from themselves. To take an example from Paris, because I'm going to talk about Paris in a while, in the 1830s a certain Vicomte--quite forgettable--exclaimed,

How ugly Paris seems after one year away. How one stifles in these dark, damp, narrow corridors [damp, that's a key word in all this] which you are pleased to call the streets of Paris. One would think that it was an underground city, so sluggish in the air, so profound the obscurity. In it thousands of people live, bustle, throng in the liquid darkness, like reptiles in a marsh. Or Victor Hugo. "Cities, like forests, have their dens in which hide all the vilest and most terrible monsters. All is ferocious." It couldn't be any more condemning than--particularly in Germany, where the whole sense of having a hometown, of being attached to a particular space and all of the corruption that comes from big cities. You see this over and over again. Take New York. Here's another reverend, the Rev. Amory D. Mayo, who attacked the city. All the dangers of the town may be summed up here, that here withdrawn from the blessed influence of nature [that is, out of the country] and set face to face against humanity, mankind loses his own nature and becomes a new and artificial creature, an unhuman cog in a social machinery that works like fate. Again, in mile Zola, the theme of fate is terribly important, of destiny along with, as you'll see, people that have those, if you've read other Zola, that have the bad genes. They've got the drinking genes or whatever. You find all this appalling stuff. Here's another one in a lecture in 1844, The Young Americans. The cities drain the country of the best part of its population, the flower of its youth of both sexes. They go into the town and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. Et cetera, et cetera. That was the image. And, of course, all of the revolutions have a lot to do with that. Simon, I can't find my wand. Is it up there? It's not? Voil. Can you do it? Thanks. Let's look at an example of this. I'm sorry, I can't click. I'm just going to have to wave my hands frenetically, or something, or jump up and down. I want you to look at Paris and think about what I've said. This is Paris in 1839. Compared to London--I don't have to talk about this. In London you can walk miles and you're still staggering around looking for the next Tube stop, because it's about three times as big, at least three times as big physically. Paris, in 1837 you could walk from the Arc de Triomphe, which is up on the left, to the ending about an hour and a half. This is before the inner suburbs are annexed for tax reasons, but also for reasons of imposing order on the troublesome periphery. This is part of the lecture. What you've got is, if you know Paris at all, it doesn't matter if you don't know Paris, here's the Garden of Luxemburg. You've got the Tuileries up along the Seine there. You've got your

basic Seine river. You did have three islands, now there are but two. They cemented that one over. Ile Saint-Louis there, which is now one of the great tourist traps in Western civilization, but it's still beautiful. There's Cit with old Notre Dame right in the middle. You've got an enormous population. You've got in the central districts three times the density of population that you have now. We have an apartment in the Marais a couple of blocks up from Notre Dame. The density there in the 1840s in this neighborhood which is called the Arcis [today it is just part of the Marais], was three times what it is now. You've got this enormous implosion of people into the center from the provinces. Next one, please. Voil. The reason I put this up here, this is the first photo of Paris. This is what you call the daguerreotype, daguerreotype. I can identify this as--I'm sure not the only one, but this is thefaubourg. It's an English word as well as French. It means it's sort of an extension of the town. It's a difficult etymology. It doesn't really come from false bourg, but from other things. It's beyond the walls. But this is the first one. This is also from about 1837. Now, Haussmann, the Alsacian Attila, he built these boulevards that became the staging ground for the so-called Belle poque. But there were also boulevards anywhere around, because the boulevards were where the walls had once been. Vienna is a great example. The rings around Vienna were the rings where the walls had been that were knocked down as the city grew. In Berlin you find the same thing. Next, please. This is cheating a little bit. This is just unhealthy. This is an eighteenth-century hat. Look at the guy. He's a nineteenth-century guy looking progressively forward to the nineteenth century with his bourgeois outfit. This could be the Restoration, actually. He's going to get hit. "It's raining," he says, but it's not. It's a chamber pot being dumped on his head. In the 1860s only about ten percent of buildings had water above the second floor. Next, please. This is by a guy called Charles Meryon. It doesn't matter. The point of this is this is Cit. There's Notre Dame there, before Viollet-le-Duc's big spire on it. The point is that before the rebuilding of Paris this was among the most densely populated parts of Paris. At the end of the period, that is 1870, it's the least densely populated part of Paris. Because--remember capitalism and the state? They build government buildings. The hospital is one of them. The Prefecture of Police, which had all the fighting around it in 1944, in August, was built as well. These places disappear. The morgue, one of the more important morgues was here also. That again, gave the idea of the disease of the center city. Next, please. Name those people. There we go. Paris on the left. It's 1850. Paris on the right. They're all running together. You see there's a lot more people. You have the filling-in of the center. You've got the periphery with the

emergence of these suburbs. It's the suburbs that have increasingly poor people living in them who can't afford to live in the center of Paris. That's the big difference. That's a big, big difference. You have a customs barrier around Paris. Every time you bring things into the city, or any other French city, you have to pay taxes on it. A six-pack of beer, you pay a tax. You have more space outside the city walls, so that's where you build factories. You're nearer to the canals and to railroads, so that's where you build factories. The center city froze the unwanted industries, the dirty industries--soap, chemical, etc.--outside. Paris doesn't de-industrialize. You still have the garment industry. But the dirty industries, the big industries stay on the outside. That's where your labor force lives. How different that is than Philadelphia or Detroit, where you already had all this space and you've got the population moving into big central areas and essentially staying there. To be sure, in the United States, we have places like a very small part of New Orleans. You've got San Francisco. You've got Beacon Hill. You've got Manhattan. You've got places where you've got a lot of wealthy people living in the center city. But places like Detroit are more really common of the American experience. Next, please. I can remember when I was a kid, when I was younger than you, I think, going to a Yankee-Tiger doubleheader in 1967. Roy Whit played third base. We walked out and the city of Detroit was on fire because of the riots. It's still all burned out there. One of the interesting things was Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which is a very fancy place. We have a lot of students here from Grosse Pointe. I'm not dissing Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but the municipal council tried to figure out a way that you couldn't get to Grosse Pointe from the center of Detroit unless you had a map, unless you really knew how to get there to try to keep "them," that is, the poor people of the center, from going to the suburbs. The upper classes of Grosse Pointe armed themselves with their hunting rifles, just as the constables had in central London in 1848. The spatial juxtaposition is incredible. Next. Oh, here we go. Those were lots of people in the center. The theme here is overcrowding. Here is the Market of the Innocents, which it's called. Now it's down by the forum Les Halles. Lots of people. Then the big market Haussman built would later be torn down. Lots of people in the middle. That's a theme. Next, please. The Rue Pirouette in 1860. These are really old medieval buildings. A lot of them get destroyed by the rebuilding. Next, please. Viol, this is a good one. This is one of the streets that would disappear. You could say, "What the hell is he talking about? Where are all those people?" If you have really good eyes, you can see that there are a few people here, because of these long exposures, there's

actually some people standing there. This had already been condemned to be destroyed, rather like the Rue Transonain. It had part of the collective memory of the massacre there. What is this in the center? It's a ditch down where sewage went. There were some sewers in Paris, but it was very unhealthy. In these areas, this is right near the Panthon, that is sort of in the center left, eastern part of Paris. People just get destroyed by the cholera in 1832, and again in 1849, and again in the 1880s, in 1884. Fundamental inequality before death of the poor. This street--this is actually a great photo. This is by a guy called Charles Marville, who went around and took pictures of these neighborhoods that were going to disappear. Don't worry about the names. Don't worry about the streets. I'm trying just to make a point. Not everybody lived on those streets. In the second empire, that is 1852-1870, Napoleon III, people lived it up. A lot of Zola's novels are really amazing about that. He didn't like Louis Napoleon terribly much. This is living it up in a big banquet in a big hotel. Already you can see the wine glasses. They're starting to put the wine glasses in connection with the food. That's something that comes in the nineteenth century, the idea of having red wine with cheese. You do have white wine with goat's cheese. Or having white wine with--most with fish and fowl and that kind of thing, and these long, elaborate banquets of one course following another. I can hardly condemn that, having sat through a few thousand of them myself. Anyway, there we go. Fancy people. Next, please. This is revolution in 1830. The bourgeois guy doesn't belong there. He never went out there anyway. Marianne--this is a highly romantic view of death. Here's your street urchin there, who's fighting the good fight in 1830. This is Delacroix's famous Liberty Leading the People. This is an enormous painting. These people look like they're kind of playacting. They're kind of saying, "Oh, I'm dead now." A few minutes later they're going to get up again. This is very romanticized. Next, please. Compare this to Meissonier. This is a very underappreciated painting. Again, the name doesn't matter. It meant something to him and it does to art people, but this is called The Barricade. This is only eighteen years later. This is 1848. This is real death. These are ordinary people. Again, look at the gray-green, the sick corridors. This is an affectionate look at people who are dying for a good cause in the center of Paris. Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, didn't want revolution again. Since there were barricades in so many of these revolutions, barricades begin on the day of the barricades in Paris in 1572, or something like that, before this course stokes up. He said, "Let's build the boulevards so wide that you can't build

barricades across them." In 1944 and in 1968 barricades were in the same places, often, where the revolutionary barricades had been in 1789 or in 1848 or 1871. These guys, that's Napoleon, the guy with the pen. That's Haussmann, who was born in Paris but had Alsacian parents. He's in the middle. Louis Napoleon flops a map down and says, "Build big boulevards through this teeming city," "teeming" used for the third time. He does that for three reasons. One, two, three. One, to bring more air into Paris, more boulevards with sewers underneath them. Boulevards mean better transportation, more light. Secondly, he does this to increase the flow of capital. It's not a coincidence that department stores are built on these boulevards. Some of the ones are still there. The shopkeepers not near department store got wiped out. They were really mad. Very extreme rightwing voting at the end of the nineteenth century. The ones near the department stores do very well. Third, and he says it in Haussmann's memoirs, Louis Napoleon wants these built so you can't have barricades. He builds these boulevards around and through the traditional revolutionary areas. The result is lots of people pack up and they leave. Next. We're going to go through the next ones fairly quickly. Here's Paris 1855. Belleville up there, or La Villette, or Montmartre there, which has a god-awful church, Sacr-Coeur, built on it after 1871. Those were annexed as suburbs in 1860. It's inner suburbs annexed into Paris. This wall here is the limit of Paris today. You still have people farming in Vaugirard and these places, Grenelle. All that will stop. By 1870 this is all sort of packed with people. The people living in Belleville, which is on a hill, were people many of whom were forced out of the central quarters by high rents. They are the ones perched dangerously, from the point of view of the center, on the periphery. Ironically, as the middle classes move further and further west, they lost their contact with ordinary people. A lot of the stuff they're reading is based upon--they don't really see those people up there. Maybe they walk down the hill, they can't afford to take the horse-drawn carriages, the omnibuses, to be servants in their houses. These spatial things are very interesting. You find them in other cities, too. Here, they take the map and they say, "Let's build boulevards." You don't have to know anything about Paris to know that there wasn't any north-south--north is up there; south is down toward me--thoroughfare, and they built Boulevard Saint Michel, Boulevard Strasbourg, Boulevard Saint Denis that goes up to the station of the east with the station of the north, right to the left. toile, up here, the boulevards help create the kind of star notion. toile means star. It looks like a star around the Arc de Triomphe and the big grand crossing that I'll show you in a minute that gives you the westeast access, as well as some other ones, too.

They do a lot of building. They knock down a whole hill. This is now where the Palace of Trocadro is, lots of work employing lots of people, so the housing workers like them. In 1855, let's look at--you're walking through the Gallery of Machines at one of these world fairs. Because Victoria had one in 1851, Louis Napoleon's got to have one, too. He has two. He has one in 1855 and another one in 1866 or 1867. You're walking along here. You can look at paintings. Above all, you can look at machines. You can look at things you can buy. That's the principle of these expositions. Paris is on stage. That's the principle of a department store. You can walk through a department store and you can buy forty-nine different kinds of shawls, ranging from very cheap ones to very expensive ones. It's the same principle. The boulevards are really an extension of, as my friend Phillip Nord once argued and so have a lot of other people, these department stores themselves. They become sort of a staging area for what became known as the Belle Epoque. It wasn't so belle for people who didn't have any money, because those were hard economic times. These department stores still exist. The BHV, the Bazaar de l'Hotel de Ville still exists in Paris. Bon March. There's a terrific book on Bon March by Michael Miller. It's still there. Zola called them "the cathedrals of modernity." Already in the 1850s they had singing groups singing Christmas carols at Christmas. People would come. They couldn't afford to buy anything and just be part of the spectacle. Paris became a spectacle in itself. The boulevards were part of this. These aren't very good prints, but he was so important he became-to haussmann something was to bulldoze it. Maybe to "Merriman" something would be to drink a good bottle of Ctes du Rhne. Maybe one day that will be mine. Maybe I'll get a French verb. I'm just kidding. But

anyway, haussmannisation is to bulldoze something. This is called the haussmannisation of a neighborhood. Here, these people are getting the equivalent of about ten dollars, forced out of their houses. They've got their dog. They've got everything they own there. Look at the mattress. A mattress is the last thing you ever pawned. There's the mattress. They're leaving. The next one, please. This is called Haussmann Part II. Here you've got your Haussmannian vista. You've got the big boulevards with all these not then so fancy balcony railings. The real fancy ones come later in the Third Republic. This is really St. Augustine. It's a hideous church. Some people really like it. My dear friend Bob Herbert thinks it's not bad, the art historian. This is haussmannisation of a corridor, part two, of a neighborhood. Next, please. You've got people building. That's the Tour Saint-Jacques, which is still there. A lot of these are little teeny people who are from the center part of France or the builders. Everybody's aware of this building.

Here you can say, "How are we going to get from Point 1, which is down by the Seine, the Rue de Rivoli, which has been expanded? How do you get to this new opera they're building?" First you tip off your friends so they make a lot of money on the deal, knowing what to sell and what to buy. Then you take a ruler. You didn't have to be an architectural genius. You draw a straight line. That's what I mean by "imperialism of the straight line." Next, please. You're getting to the opera. There you can see it rising up, Garnier's opera. It rises up out of the smoke, out of the cloud of destruction. I'm getting carried away. Next, please. There it's being built. There it is. You are here looking at what now is the largest concentration of pickpockets in the western world, because there's an American Express right near there. You see all these Americans. They've got their big wallets. They say, "Where's the American Express, dear?" It's right over here. Voop! Their wallets are out of there before they hit the top step of the Mtro. That baby's gone. Anyway, that's the Place Vendme down there. Next, please. There it is in 1900. Here again, imperialism in a straight line. There you've got--maybe I'll do a thing on blowing up this building here. Sometime we'll come back to this maybe. Anyway, there you go. Here's the great crossing in the center of Paris. This is--you're crossing from Ile of Cit here and you're going up. Here's the Gare de l"Est, the station of the east there. This way you're looking down east. There's the Tour Saint Jacques. The only point is that they expand this down toward Saint Antoine and the Faubourg Saint Antoine where the revolutionaries were in 1848, and where they were in 1789, and where they were in 1792, as well, and at other times in the French Revolution, 1830 for example. They're down there. That's the big crossing point, la grande croise. There's the Gare de l'Est. When I see that station it's so sad. That's where all the people drinking champagne went in 1914 shouting, " Berlin." Just as in Hauptbahnhof, in Berlin they were shouting "Nacht Paris." Of course, they don't come back. So many Jews were deported from here, if they were sent from the Galle du Nord to Drancy, if they were on the direct line to Auschwitz or the other death camps, they went through this station. Next. Arrested by French police, 1942-1943. He builds Les Halles, the big market. My friend Vincent Scully, who teaches in here afterward, he would do a better job on this, but I do remember the first time I was ever in Paris. I don't know how old I was. Younger than I once was and than I am now, or younger than I'll be, or whatever the line is. I met somebody on a bus in Germany. She was a sculpturess and she kindly invited me to stay in her apartment. It was all on the up and up. It was no problem. She took me down in the middle of the night to see this place, and to see the restaurants where you'd see the wealthy people eating, and the

butchers with their smocks covered with Beaujolais and also with animal blood. It was really cool. Then they tore this down. They tore it down to build a whole bunch of unsuccessful places and the filthy destruction of a monument. We need Vince Scully here to do this. People chain themselves to these things. They say, "Can't you leave just one so you people would know what these are like? Can't you leave just one?" They said, "No, we can make some money here. We can get in--soon we'll have McDonald's all over the place. We'll make some money." They got rid of them and there's none of them left. It's a tragedy. Haussmann built those. I'm not a big Haussmann guy. Here is a Haussmann building right around the corner from our apartment in Paris on the rue du Temple. Here's a building with more Third Republic. These are the buildings that he built along the boulevards. Next, please. I've got to rocket on. If you follow art history you know there's a very famous painting by Caillebotte that shows the anonymity. It's called Paris with the Effect of Rain. It's right here on this place, which is where two boulevards come together. That's part of the thing, too. You've got your basic middle class people. They were carrying umbrellas. They are disconnected. They would never say hello to each other, and they're crossing this intersection that becomes part of the heartbeat of urban life, or something dramatic like that. Next, please. You've got these boulevards. This already existed, because it was where the walls had once been. This is the Boulevard Montmartre. Next, please. Oh, man. There was supposed to be another one there. Anyway, no problem. My bad. If you were flying around overhead, you would look down here. Here is Notre Dame. There's Les Halles up in that direction. That's the church of Saint Sulpice. You see the big crossing points, the big boulevards that have been built. Here's the big old crossing point there, the Tour Saint Jacques. A bird's eye view of all of this. What I left out was Camille Pissarro's image from that same point where he painted. An impressionist painted because of their interest in light and first view and all of that. There's a lot of important paintings of this. Renoir didn't like these boulevards. He said they're lined up like troops at a review. That's the most appropriate image of the centralization of state power. Speaking of state power, what happens in the Paris Commune in 1871 is that ordinary people in Paris take arms, as you know. They build barricades across these places. Next, please. Then the troops of the provisional government from Versailles, appropriately enough, come in and they use these same boulevards, the extension of the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue St. Antoine, to go and gun down ordinary people, 25,000 of them. Welcome to the twentieth century in 1871, when you were

guilty for whom you were. " Paris tout le monde tait coupable." "In Paris everybody was guilty," said a prosecuting attorney. Next, please. But the spatial aspects of this are important. This is right. That's the Madeleine. There's just a lot of destruction. Here's Manet's depiction of women being shot. There were these images of rumors that women incendiaries were burning down the wealthy buildings of the property. Les ptroleuses, the female incendiaries. Manet did one and so did Courbet. Next, please. Finally, that's real death. Those are rather small people in tiny caskets who have just been mowed down because they were who they were, that is poor and in people's Paris. They systematically targeted areas like Belleville, because they were identified with the left. If we could speed through these next few, then we'll be out of here. Next, please. Here again, those are the boulevards with the old gates. Here's what I mean by east-west. In the northwestern part of Paris people were moving into slightly better buildings. In the northeast, more rural looking ones just on the outside, the laundry of combat. We know this is after 1900, because there's a reference to the metro. The metro didn't open until 1900. So, this is probably about 1912, actually there. People on the periphery coming in to pawn their mattresses. Here's the gates when you were outside. Again, why are all the factories on the outside, all the ordinary people? Because life was cheaper out there. That's why beyond Montparnasse are all these caf areas that are still in Paris, now, but were once out there, because it was cheaper to be out there. At the end of her sad, short, drunken life, Gervaise in L'Assommoir goes out to hook on the periphery, on the boulevard. She gets poorer and poorer. Zola was so well aware of the spatial concomitants of all of this. This is what it was like passing through the barrier. It's outside that the red belt exists. It's outside of all. Vienna is a classic example. In the 1930s you've got the army blasting, firing cannons against the working-class housing perched on the outside of town. "Sires," said one of the ministers to Louis Philippe, "those usines, those factories that you are allowing to be built around Paris, on the outskirts will be the cord that strangles us one day." It's on the outskirts in these industrial suburbs that had once been producing cherries for the urban market and fruit, but now were their factories. It's there that the Communist party did so well in the 1920s and 1930s, and even beyond. They provided social services. They defended people. They were called the mal lotis, people that had inappropriate places to live. So that, again, was what I meant by center versus periphery and the sense of not belonging to the center, of not belonging to the center. You see the same thing with people living inside of American cities, of not belonging to prosperity. It can contribute to a formation of a counter-

society, of kind of a sense of not belonging that creates a sense of belonging. As we are rejected, we too can become powerful. The spatial aspects of this are terribly important. Look at the riots in the suburbs in 2005. We don't have time to talk about that, but that's a fascinating thing. Different people who are marginalized by the center, large populations of North Africans, and of West Africans, and people from the Caribbean. It's the same phenomenon, the center and periphery is there. Last, and I think I've pulled it off, if you went westward, this is a Monet. This is one of the many regattas at Angers. You went westward for pleasure, not eastward. You went further and further so the middle classes, particularly in the western part of Paris, plant their flag defiantly in Normandy, in Deauville, and in Angoville and all of these places there. It's there that the impressionists paint the Parisian upper classes, who when you go to Deauville you still see all the 75 license plates and the 78s from the Paris region. It's still the place. There's a social geography of leisure, too, that develops in Paris, as in these other cities. It happens so remarkably in what was not only the bourgeois century, not only the rebellious century, but above all, the urban century where the way in which people lived in very important ways was transformed. Thank you very much. Good luck on the midterm. See you next week. See you on Wednesday.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 13 Transcript October 20, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: It's kind of a complicated lecture today. I want to talk about nationalism and I do so with a skepticism that you'll quickly pick up on. Aggressive nationalism helped unleash the demons of the twentieth century, beginning with World War I, which unleashed even more dangerous demons after that. I want to talk about nationalism and particularly in--a little bit of France, but in places that one doesn't usually consider. I'll end up drawing on my friend Tim Snyder's work to talk a little bit about Lithuania and Belarus, and why their nationalism were very different and, in the second case, didn't really exist at all in the nineteenth century. And I'm going to give a counter example, which I treat in the book but is the Austria-Hungarian Empire. It's funny, because one couldn't have imagined in the 1970s, looking nostalgically back on the Austria-Hungarian Empire, this polyglot Habsburg regime. But the horrors of the Balkans really made lots of historians and other social scientists look back and try to figure out how it was that--instead of asking why it was the Austria-Hungarian Empire collapsed during World War I, or really at the end of World War I, turning the question around and saying, "How did it hold together so long?" So, the Austria-Hungarian Empire is sort of a counter example to these nationalisms. One of the things that brought the empire down, along with the war, was competing national claims from ethnic minorities within those vast domains. I want to start with a story. It's a book I read maybe five or six years ago. Histories have their histories, so I'm going to tell the history of this particular book. You'll see kind of what I'm getting at. By the way, I sent out--one of you had a great idea, emailed me saying, "Why don't you send out the terms before the lecture?" That was a great idea. I'd never thought of that. I did it last night, though I didn't put this particular book on it. Anyway, the book is Anastasia

Karakasidou's, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990. When I say that histories have their own history, what I mean is the following. In this book, this anthropologist, who is from both Turkish and Greek extraction on either side of her family, is writing a book about a small part of Macedonia. Macedonia, of course, was heavily contested for centuries. A trade route went through it. In Macedonia there were Turks, and there were Serbs, and there were Bulgarians, and Macedonians, and Greeks. For centuries they had all basically gotten along as that part of the Balkans, as you know, in the past was under the Ottoman Empire and then through a whole series of arrangements, of wars, the Balkan wars before World War I, passed back and forth. Essentially, that is one of the points of the book, is that basically people got along very well, but that gradually what happened is that among competing national claims that part of Macedonia became seen by Greeks as part of greater Greece. Whenever you hear the term "greater Greece," or "greater Serbia," or "greater Germany," or greater anything, look out. What that means is that in the imaginary, in the view of nationalists, particularly aggressive nationalists, parts of the territories that have large percentages of a certain ethnic group or even in some cases only minorities, but in other cases majorities, should be included, come what may, in the greater state of that particular ethnic group. If you take the example of Kosovo, and Kosovo has about eighty-five percent of the population is made up of Albanian Muslims. Kosovo was part of Serbia. When Milosevic was talking about "greater Serbia," greater Serbia for him could not exist unless Kosovo, with its eighty-five percent of people who weren't Serb, was included in that. Anyway, that's another story. What happened with this particular book is that when this book was in manuscript, arguing that basically the idea that Macedonia was Greek was a construction, was an invention, an invented identity by Greek nationalists, the press, the university press, I guess since this is being recorded I shouldn't say which one that was, chickened out and decided not to publish the book. At one point they got a bomb threat from Greek nationalists saying that, "If you publish this book, we will blow up your offices in Europe." So, they chickened out. In an example of just utter, craven cowardice refused to publish the book. They sent this author, whom I don't know--I've read the book. It's a really terrific book--and said, "Sorry. We're not going to publish your book. Too bad, contract or no contract." So, University of Chicago Press published the book, and when the book came out this particular author received a lot of hate mail. She received a picture of herself with a picture of a Greek flag stuck through where her heart would be. These are fairly serious threats.

The point of that is not to jump on Greek nationalists or on Serb nationalists, though certainly the Serb ultranationalists have done just an incredible amount of damage in the Balkans over the past decades, but merely to underline the point that national identities are constructed. They're invented. They're, in a way, imaginary. One of the most interesting sort of historical things you could do as an historian is to try to figure out, from where do these identities come? Language plays a lot of it. Maybe if I have time, because I've got to do a lot today, but this is more of a conversation than a lecture. If I have time I might talk a little bit about language in the case of France. But, in doing so, like most people talking about nationalism, I'm drawing on some of the thinking of Benedict Anderson, and his concept that nationalism and the construction of national self-identity represents "imagined communities." Basically, if you consider yourself a member of X nationality, you are creating links or you are agreeing to links with people whom you don't know, people that live in Portland, Oregon, or people that live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or people that live in New Jersey, even though we are sitting here in Connecticut. One of the useful aspects of Anderson's account is yet again to look back at the construction of nationalism to see that here we have that old story. It's states and large-scale economic change that are the two driving forces in the construction of national identities. I've gone on, at least in two lectures and part of another one talking about British national identity--and I'm certainly not going to go through that again, except to say that it was precociously early, the sense of being British. I also argued along the lines that we can now, at least for elites, say that French national identity began to be constructed in at least by the middle of the eighteenth century. When you think of the real hotspots, the real trouble spots of the twentieth century, when you think of the origins of World War I, which we will be doing and thinking out loud together over the next couple weeks, we will be considering Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the Balkans. What's important to understand, and this is a reasonably decent transition from the initial discussion of this anthropologist's excellent book, is that in most of those places there was no sense of national identity, of being Slovene, of being Czech, of being Croat, of being Bulgarian, of being Ukrainian or Ruthenian--the two are essentially the same--until quite late in the nineteenth century. Part of what's going on in Europe between the 1880s and 1914 is this is an incredible "advancement," if you want to call it that, in thinking with the emergence of ethnic national identities competing and demanding their own states in that part of the world.

When, in late June 1914, a sixteen-year-old heavily-armed guy, Serb nationalist--I once put my feet, which no longer--my feet still exist, but the steps in Sarajevo no longer exist because of all the bombing, in the place where Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the assassination that led, because of this sort of entangling diplomatic alliances, to World War I. He was someone who practically could not have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century, even though among Serb elites there was a national sense. I'm going to give you some examples taken from Anderson of even the publication of the very first dictionaries in languages that now are quite common for us to identify with ethnic national states. In fact, some of these languages did not even have their own written dictionaries until the middle of the nineteenth century. That's not so long ago. Nationalism has to be constructed. A sense of self-identity has to be constructed. That's what I want to talk about. Let me say something at the beginning. Because of the French Revolution and because of the development in Europe and in other places of parliamentary regimes and democracies, it's fairly common to think, "National self-consciousness equals a desire for national states and you can't have that with a monarchy." That's not really true at all. That's influenced, for example, by the experience of the United States. In the United States, the thirteen colonies, English was overwhelmingly the language of the thirteen colonies. They are rebelling in 1776 and all of that against other English-speaking people who happened to have a monarchy. So, "no taxation without representation" really became also a kind of an anti-monarchist sentiment. If you think of the Spanish, the rebellions in Latin America against Spain, there, too, the rebellions, though there were millions of indigenous peoples who did not speak Spanish, but basically it was a rebellion of Spanish speakers against a monarch that was Spanish, speaking in the case of Spain. If you think about really extreme ethnic nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, you think of two states which helped kind of push the world to the catastrophe that was World War I, one has to point the finger at both Russia and Germany, which had autocracies. This is jumping ahead a little bit, but I'm providing you an overview. For example, the campaign--this is jumping ahead a little bit--the campaign of Russiafication that was undertaken by the Russian czars, a brutal campaign against non-Russian minorities, was, in part, a response to rebellions within the Russian empire by Poles, for example, who rise up in 1831 and in 1863 and are crushed like grapes. In 1863, Bismarck, the chancellor of Germany, congratulates the czar for stomping on the Polish insurgents. But the campaign of Russiaficiation was part of the re-invention of Russian national identity.

When I talked about Peter the Great, I talked about how he saw himself as this great Russian patriot. Well, aggressive Russian nationalism picks its targets rather systematically in the campaigns of Russiaficiation. The big pogroms, the massacres of Jews in Odessa, in Crimea, and in other places, are cheered on by the Russian czar, by Nicholas II, whom I will talk about when I get to the Russian Revolution, who saw this as a healthy thing, that the Jews are being beaten to death by real Russians. This was part of his campaign of Russiafication. In the case of Germany you've got this madcap loser, Wilhelm II, cracking bottles of champagne, or not of champagne, but of Riesling, as I said, over big speedy battleships and all of that. Nobody was a more aggressive nationalist than Wilhelm II, the Kaiser, who kept saying rather disingenuously that he was "the number one German" and all of that. We can get rid of the idea that strong national identity necessarily has a parliamentary outcome. In the case of Britain, we're not going to talk about Britain too much, but the case of Britain is pretty interesting, too. But there you have a monarch without real power. Victoria represents in the imaginary of the British citizens the stability and the constitutional settlement of the British Empire. Yet, a couple of points need to be made. Language is important in all of this, though not always. Maybe if I have time I'll give a Swiss example later on. Basically, in the case of Russian and German nationalism, and French nationalism and even Spanish nationalism, because of the dominance of Castille, one looks back to the time when national languages, which already existed, are used and become identified with this self-identity of national people. Now, Latin was the language. Latin was the language of science, of diplomacy, of everything. Part of what's intriguing and important about the scientific revolution is that vernacular languages begin to be used as a way of communicating scientific discoveries. There's a little bit in that chapter that you read about that. Certainly, language is closely tied to national self-identity. One of the ways when nationalism is most aggressive and most vulgar is when very ordinary people who are whipped up, egged on or in some ways urged on by elites began identifying people who don't speak the same language is somehow not part of this imagined community. An obvious example would be all the Hungarians who, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the subsequent treaties named after Paris suburbs, are included in Romania and are treated as outsiders. This is very important even in the origins of the 1989 revolution that brought down the dreadful Ceausescu dictators in Romania. Anyway, the vernacular develops. If you exclude the cases of Latin America rebelling against Spain and the Americans rebelling against the British, development of these languages, and the use of the languages and their

identity with this imagined community is obviously a very important part of this as well. With the development is the concept of being a citizen. This is one of the many reasons the French Revolution is so important. You were no longer the subject of the king, you were a citoyen, or if you're a female you're a citoyenne. Citizenship takes on this kind of linguistic aspect as well. During the French Revolution, there was a revolutionary priest called the Abb Grgoire. I think I mention him in the book. He thought that all of these regional languages should be squished like grapes, because somehow they stood in the way of a true French national identity. Language is so terribly complicated. In the case of Italy, which is in some ways a counter example, I think I said before but it's true. At the time of the Italian unification, only about four or five percent of the population of Italy, of the whole boot and Sicily, spoke what is now considered to be Italian. The case of France, which I know more about, is equally fascinating because of the time of the French Revolution half the French population did not speak French. There was a lot of bilingualism, but they did not speak French. If you imagine a map of France, and I think I went through this very quickly before, but if you imagine a map of France and if you start at the top, they spoke Dutch in Dunkirk and places like that. If you move over to Alsace and much of Lorraine, they spoke a German dialect there. That would be a majority language until well after World War I. How the French tried to get rid of the German is another story, a sort of national aggression, even in the context of Germany's defeat after World War I. If you move further south, as you go to Savoy, don't write this down, but Savoy was annexed to France in 1860. People spoke essentially Piedmontese, which is the language spoken in northern Italy in the strongest state of Italy, Piedmont Sardinia. Then you go further down and they spoke what? They spoke Provencal. Provencal, as in Jean de Florette, and Manon des Sources and these Provencal poets setting up at a place called Les Baux and freezing in the winds of the mistral and reading each other Provenal poetry. Then you go to Languedoc and they spoke Occitan, which is a language of Oc. It's a southern French language. It's a written language. You go to Catalonia and they spoke Catalan. No surprise there. You go into the Basque country and they spoke Basque, which is only remotely connected to Finnish and Magyar. Those are the three hardest languages in Europe. How they got there is another whole story. We don't really know. If you go north, they spoke Gascon. If you go into Brittany, they spoke Breton, which has nothing to do with French at all. Even in places that didn't have languages there were patois. Patois is a sort of a denigrating term. "Well, they speak patois." In other words, they don't speak really French. In central

France they spoke one patois. In the Limousin they spoke another patois that was related to that one. Even in the Loire Valley people spoke patois. This did not condemn them to eternal backwardness. One might say that in the construction of French national identity, there was an argument a long time ago by my late friend Eugen Weber that said that all French national identity had to be constructed between 1880 and 1910, because of railroads, military conscription, and education. Railroads, military conscription, and education. It's easy to see how that would work. In fact, he missed one of the complexities of this glorious country, which is that lots of Breton soldiers didn't learn French until they were in the trenches, if they were lucky enough to survive in World War I, and they still spoke Breton in the 1920s and 1930s. There are still old ladies in Brittany that still speak Breton and their command of French is a bit problematic. In Corsica they still have many people who speak Corsican. They may or may not feel like they're French. Bilingualism, just as a little aside, in the village where I've spent half my life almost, in the last twenty-five years or so, people spoke patois and not French through the 1930s. That really sort of disappeared. Now older friends of ours understand patois, but they don't speak it. I had something from a book that I needed someone to look at to make sure that what I'd written in patois was correct. Not that I wrote it, but I took it from something. My friend, my boule partner, Lulu, his parents spoke that as their main language, but he couldn't correct it. Those languages are disappearing. The point of all this is that now the more we know about national self-identity, it's possible to have more than one identity. It's also just a leap of faith to say, "Who are you?" You ask who they are. That they're going to say, "Well, I'm German," or "I'm French" is going to be the first thing that they're going to say. They may say, "I'm from this village," or "I'm from this family," or "I'm from this region," or "I'm Catholic," or Protestant, or Jewish, or Muslim, some response like that. But yet when we think of nationalism, we think of these languages as being motors for elites, first, and then ordinary people to demand that the borders of states be drawn in a way that reflects their ethnicity. After World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, you've gone to war over the whole damn question of nationalism. All these millions of people get killed, dying in terrible ways--gas and everything else, flamethrowers and machine guns and all this stuff that we'll talk about. And, so, they say, "If we draw the lines around these people and give everybody a state, that will be cool. Then we won't have wars anymore." So, they get all these big maps and these mapmakers and they try to draw these state boundaries after the collapse of the four empires. It doesn't work. You can't do it. You've got winners and you've got losers. If you're going to

punish the losers, like Hungary, then you leave Hungary this small country with much of its population living on the other side of borders, and either imagining that that should still be part of Hungary, or wanting themselves to live back in Hungary where there would be nothing for them at all. Yet, the period we're talking about and the period I began with, you've got this mobilization of elites saying, "Holy cow! We need our own state." Remember a line I already gave you a lecture or two ago, all these Czechs sitting in 1848 in a room like this, not quite as nice. They say, "If the ceiling falls in, that's the end of the Czech national movement." Between 1848, the springtime of the peoples, and 1914, you have millions of people who, a couple decades before that, had absolutely no sense or very little sense of being Slovene, or Slovak, or Croat, or whatever, who are suddenly making national demands and wanting to have a separate state within the context--or to be independent from the Austria-Hungarian Empire. One of those people was the sixteen-year-old boy, Princip, who blows the brains out of Franz Ferdinand and his wife when this car backs up the wrong street in Sarajevo, although some of his friends were out there trying to get him, too. That's just a way of kind of thinking about that stuff. Let me give you a couple of examples here I wrote down. Ukraine is a huge country, a huge important country, very contested relationship with Russia now because of having gotten Crimea, and Russia wants to have Crimea and all of this. It's a highly contested relationship because of the number of Russians who live in Ukraine and all of that. For Ukrainians, the sense that Ukraine always existed is always taken as a given. The first Ukrainian grammar book, and this is not dissing Ukrainians or anybody, but I'm just saying that the reality is that the first Ukrainian grammar book was published not in 1311 or in 1511, but in 1819 is the very first one. The first Czech-German dictionary--if you're going to have a national identity you've got to have a dictionary so you can translate things between German and Czech. It's a long publication process. It's published in 1935 to 1939, A to Z. The first Czech national organization, the one I just described, starts in 1846. That's pretty recent. The first Norwegian grammar book, which distinguished Norwegian as a separate language and a separate identity from say Swedish and Danish, is not until 1848. The first dictionary that is making a distinction between Norwegian and Danish isn't until 1850. That's what I mean about the construction of national identity. You have to have a sense that you are part of this imagined community. Having said that, before I talk about a counter example, let me do this like that. Why not? Let me give you a couple examples that I hope make the point. These I'm drawing from Timothy Snyder. Let's look at why at the end of the nineteenth century Lithuanian nationalism develops.

You know Lithuania, capital is Vilnius, big tall basketball players like Sabonis, who played in the NBA. Why Lithuanian nationalism rapidly develops, but only at the end of the nineteenth century, and Belarusian nationalism doesn't develop at all until way in--it's even pushing it to say in the 1920s and 1930s. Now there's this huge Belarus--I was in Poland. The various times I've been to Poland. There was a huge dinner with all these Belarusians who most of them were dissidents and are there to discuss the history of Belarus, but none of them would be claiming that Belarus had a self-identity before the 1930s. But Lithuania existed. Lithuania was part of the Polish-Lithuania commonwealth, which exists basically until the last partition of Poland in 1795, when Poland gets munched, bouff, by the great powers. Who do these people think they were? They think they're Polish. They consider themselves Polish. Poles already had a basis for nationalism. They had a written language. They have heroes, Chopin. Chopin didn't go to Paris as a refugee from Russian repression. He went there to further his musical career. But anyway, he wrote lots that had to do with Polish national themes, folklore and all of that. There have been dukes of Lithuania, grand dukes, but they didn't accept Lithuanian as a language. If they wanted to get anywhere, they tried to pass themselves off as Poles. Pilsudski, a name you will come back to who destroyed the Polish republic, as one after another of European states goes authoritarian in the 1920s and 1930s. Pilsudski, who was the hero of the miracle of the Vistula River when the Polish army turns back the Red Army at the end of World War I in just sort of an amazing moment. Pilsudski himself was Lithuanian. But he considered himself Polish. He was absolutely a Lithuanian. Yet there was a Lithuanian language, but it was not spoken by the elites. Who spoke the Lithuanian language? It was spoken by the peasants. At the end of the nineteenth century, you've suddenly got all these Lithuanian intellectuals and grand dukes and priests and various people saying, "Wait a minute. We are Lithuanians and happily, the Lithuanian peasantry has saved our language." The last Lithuanian duke who spoke Lithuanian died before Columbus discovered America, Tim Snyder informed me. Some may say, "These Lithuanian peasants, we won't treat them anymore as the scum of the earth. They have preserved our language for us." Suddenly, you have poets writing in Lithuanian. It's no longer a disgrace to be seen as a Lithuanian. One of these poets, a guy called Kudirka, who died in 1899, he recalled when he was in school as a smart Lithuanian kid, he said, "My self preservation instinct told me not to speak in Lithuanian and to make sure that no one noticed that my father wore a rough peasant's coat and could only speak Lithuanian. I did my best to speak Polish, even though I spoke it badly."

Polish is a terribly difficult language. There's all these sort of squiggly things. Things don't pronounce like you think they're supposed to. I don't do very well at picking up Polish. "When my father and other relatives visited me, I stayed away from them when I could see that fellow students or gentlemen were watching." He was embarrassed to be basically Lithuanian and the son of a Lithuanian peasant. "I only spoke with them at ease when we were alone or outside. I saw myself as a Pole and thus as a gentleman. I had imbibed the Polish spirit." By the end of the century he sees himself as a Lithuanian. He is one of these people who are pushing Lithuanian nationalism and it is embraced. How does this physically happen? You don't wake up and say, "I was Polish yesterday and a subject of the czar, because Poland is divided between Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. But if you were in the Russian part of what they called Congress Poland, then suddenly today I'm Lithuanian. How does that happen? Because Lithuania is next to Germany. This is also something that will make you again think of what I said about the Enlightenment. Lots of literature is smuggled into Lithuania in Lithuanian. Therefore, there's this wild profusion of Lithuanian literature that comes into Lithuania, which of course as you know was not independent. It was part of the Russian Empire. So, there's another reason, too, which is for the Russian imperial secret police, the ones that they're really worried about. They're worried about the Poles, because the Poles have risen up in 1831 and in 1863. So they're on the lookout for people that are saying, "Hey, I'm Polish. We want a Polish state." They don't pay much attention. They don't really care about these Lithuanians who are discovering their own self-identity, who are constructing their self-identity. Why doesn't it happen in Belarus? I don't have time to tell you very much about this, but the main thing is that Belarus is a long way away from anywhere at the time. There isn't any kind of elite in Belarus that embraces Belarussian anything. The language has not seen part of a national self-identity that basically does not exist and would not exist until at least after World War I. Now Lithuanians will look back on their country as if Lithuania had always had this sort of self-identity. Part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, that was more basically a Polish operation and it was a territorial thing more than any kind of construction of two peoples participating in this thing. Furthermore, Belarussians were not allowed to publish in their own language. Whereas Lithuanian priests began giving sermons in Lithuanian and you've got all this written material coming in the vernacular. Nobody read Belarussian in church. There were no priests to say that "this is our language." Belarussians who were literate could read Polish or Russian or both, but in many cases not what would become Belarussian at all.

By the end of the nineteenth century when you've got these other people insisting that "we're Slovenes" and "we're this and that," Belarussian speakers called themselves Russian if they were Orthodox religion. They called themselves Polish if they were Roman Catholic. If they were simply looking out for themselves, they just called themselves local. They said, "We live in the Russian empire and that's who we are." There was no sense of being Belarussian. There are different outcomes in all of this stuff. Having said that, we're going to get there. Let me give you another example. I want to find this date that will make you at least realize that you can have a national identity and have more than one language. It's very complex. I guess the most interesting case now would be Belgium, which I don't have a lot of time to talk about. In Belgium, I have friend who works in the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels. About seven years ago I asked him, "Do you think Belgium will exist in ten years?" He said, "I hope not." This guy works for the Belgian Ministry of Culture. This reflects the sharp antagonism between the Flemish, who basically live in the north and east, but above all the northern parts of Belgium, and who are more prosperous and who are more numerous, about say fifty-five percent of the population. Their tensions with the Walloons, that is the French speakers, Lige, and Arlon and all those places, and also in Brussels, which is technically part of the Flemish zone. Because of the bureaucracy and because Brussels is the most important city, it has become this sort of third place hotly contested by the Flemish and real serious tensions there. If you ask in French what time the train is to Bruges, they're not going to reply. They know perfectly well. They just simply won't reply. Not all of them, but those are serious tensions that are compounded also by the fact that there's going to be, not everybody, but the far right is really tied to Flemish self-identity. The Walloons, that is the French, many of the French speakers want to be attached to France, see their lives as very different. Also, the Walloon part of Belgium is basically the rust belt and the Flemish part is very prosperous in comparison. Yet Belgium, which didn't exist legally until 1831, the revolution of 1830 and 1831 is still there. By the way, there's also five percent tacked on after Versailles around a town called Eupen who speak German. Anyway, there we go. But Belgium is still there. When I'm in Belgium, which I am frequently, I think, "Now this is really Europe," because of the complexity of it. You can have a national identity without having a single dominant language, if the two sides are tolerant. Let me give you another quick example, and then we've got to rock and roll onto the A-H Empire, a shortcut now. Not Austria-Hungary. I've got to save time, so "A-H" Empire. What about Switzerland? Here you've got Switzerland. If

I remember correctly, the statistics, I think the French speaking population is twenty-two percent. German speaking or Swiss Deutsch speaking population is about maybe seventy-one percent, or something like that. You've got an Italian speaking population of about five percent. And you also have another language called Romansch, which is spoken only by a few hundred thousand people. That's three languages already, plus English, because of the international role of Geneva, is the fourth major or recognized language in Switzerland. Switzerland now is so prosperous, and full of chocolate, and full of banks, and full of watches, and all of that. You think of everybody yodeling and cows running around and everybody's very happy and eating perch out of the lakes. But the Swiss have to create this sense that they have always been a nation. But they haven't. The decentralized, federalist nature of Switzerland was always there. During the Reformation, to say somebody was turning Swiss meant that they were rejecting the demands of their lords, and rejecting the religion imposed by their lords and turning to Protestantism, if they were in a Catholic area or to Catholicism if they were in a Protestant area. The Swiss were big time mercenaries and big time farmers. But Switzerland fought its last war early in the nineteenth century and has been neutral. It's a very complicated story, what happened in Switzerland during World War II. It's very tragic. The Swiss turned so many Jews back at the frontier and sent them back to Germany, and laundering Nazi money, and all that. I'm not dumping on the Swiss, but it's a complicated story in the case of their neutrality. They decided in 1891, on the 600 th anniversary of the Swiss confederation that Switzerland began in 1291. That a bunch of people got together between all the cows and eating chocolate and all that stuff, and they announced that they were Switzerland. Here's again what Anderson means about this sort of imagined community, that you're inventing a kind of date that you said, "We've been like that since then and that's all there is to it." But if you've got all these different languages and the languages are not as far apart as French and Dutch, well in a way they are because Dutch is really, although the Dutch would not see it that way, but is a German dialect. Nonetheless, the Swiss are a lot better at learning each other's language than the French speakers certainly are at learning Dutch, which they view as impossible and don't like their kids having to learning it in school and all that. It's terribly complicated. So, they imagine this community, but it exists. Switzerland exists. People have a sense of being Swiss, despite these different languages. There are not the economic disparities. Well, there are between urban and rural life, but nothing like the disparity between the Flemish parts of Belgium and the French parts of Belgium, if you exclude Brussels and all that. Let me end in the last five minutes and seven

seconds that is allotted to me. Let me end with a counter example, which you can read about. I said at the beginning, inspired by the sheer horror of the Balkans, and some of you aren't old enough to remember, certainly not, my god, I am, all the stuff that happened in the late 1990s. You can probably remember all the massacres and stuff like that. I said at the very beginning of the hour or the beginning of the fifty minutes that people now tend to look longingly back. They say, "The Austria-Hungarian Empire, it sure lasted a long time." You had fifteen major nationalities. It was kind of a balancing act. It becomes the dual monarchy in 1867, where the Hungarians have, more or less, equal rights. You've got Austria and you've got Hungary. But you've got another thirteen peoples, at least thirteen peoples living within the empire. You've got the Croats, who have their nobility. They're kind of given favorable status. This whole thing is sort of balanced. How does the place stay together? How does Austria-Hungary stay together? I end one of those chapters, that chapter with this very famous scene from the parliament in Vienna where you've got these different ethnic groups playing drums and singing songs and trying to disrupt the speeches by people from the other nationalities. You've got all these problems with the south Slavs wanting at least minimal representation as sort of this "third state" along with Austria and Hungary. How does the thing stay together? Basically, in this way. I'm just telling you briefly about things that you can read about, but I just wanted to make some sense of it. First of all, the language of the empire is German. To get somewhere in the Austria-Hungarian Empire, you need to know German. So, learning German becomes kind of a social mobility, the way that learning French becomes for somebody from Gascony a form of social mobility. You can get a job in the bureaucracy. If you're going to have a humongous empire going all the way to the rugged terrain of Bosnia-Herzevogina, you've got to have officials and their little hats and their little desks who are going to be running all this stuff. You've got to have a language. The language of the empire is German. This does not mean that people feel that they're German. After all, they're not German. They're German speakers within the Austria-Hungarian empire. It gives them an allegiance to this apparatus. Secondly, the middle class. The middle class is German, largely, except in Budapest where it's Hungarian. Still, many Germans live in Budapest as well. One of the things I wish I had time to talk about, but you can't talk about everything, is that what you've got in these cities, and I mentioned this in reference the other day. Cities of all of Eastern Europe and central Europe, you have kind of an ethnicization of these cities. All of the cities, whether you're talking about Budapest or you're talking about Warsaw, or anywhere you're talking about, even Vilnius, you have large German populations and also large Jewish populations. In the

course of the last decades of the nineteenth century, you have this sort of rival of Estonian peasants into Talin, of Czech peasants into Prague, of Hungarian peasants into Budapest, of Lithuanian peasants into Vilnius, etc., etc. But you've still got, in the Austria-Hungarian case, you still have, even in Budapest, you still have a large middle class that is fundamentally German and believes in the empire. Next, you've got dynastic loyalty. You've got this old dude, Franz Joseph, who had been there since 1848. He lives until 1916, the same guy. That makes Victoria seem like she had a short reign. People have an allegiance to this dynasty. The Habsburg Dynasty had been dominant in central Europe until they contest the Prussians and lose out in the War of 1966. So you've got this Franz Joseph. Also you've got the Catholic Church. There are lots of Protestants. For example in the Czech lands in Bohemia, where Slovakia is almost overwhelmingly Catholic in what would become Czechoslovakia and then divorce, amicably enough, in 1993. Croatia is overwhelming Catholic, aggressively so. Despite the fact you have these huge Muslim enclaves in the old what had been the Ottoman empire, you still have this church as a unifying force, not for everybody and certainly not for the Jews, not for the gypsies, of whom are the Roma, who are very many there, and not for protestants and not for orthodox Serbs, which is part of the tensions there as well. They saw Russia as being their protector. You can read more about that, but that's another thing. Finally, you've got the army. The army is a form of social promotion as well. The army doesn't have the bad reputation that the French army did for shooting down young girls, young women protesting in strikes. It doesn't have the reputation that the brutal Garda Civila did in Spain. The army is seen as a useful way of representing the empire. It has a good reputation. German, the language, is the language of command. These soldiers and soldiers are drawn from all of these nationalities, they at least have that in common. To conclude, the most important question to ask about this empire, particularly in reference to what I've been saying about this whole hour is to not look at why it came apart, but to look at how it held together so long. Given the horrors perpetuated on Europe by aggressive nationalism from then, and even before, as during the French Revolution to this very day, sometimes, and I never thought I'd ever say this about me looking nostalgically back to an empire, but it is interesting and at least food for thought. On that note, bon apptit and see you on Wednesday.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 14 Transcript October 22, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: So, what I want to do today is resist the temptation to talk about anarchism the entire time. I sent around the terms for today of which I only forgot one or two. What I think I'll do at the beginning is I'm going to talk very quickly about socialism, and the difference between revolutionary socialism and reform socialism. Add syndicalism to the mix, and these are all terms that I sent to you, so I'm not going to write them on the board, because I need the board. Then for most of the lecture I'm going to talk about anarchism. Anarchists didn't want to reform the state. They didn't want to seize control of the state either by revolution or by electoral process. They wanted to destroy the state. So, I'm going to talk about those guys for a while. Most anarchists were not terrorists, but at the end I'm going to talk about a guy that I followed around for four or five years who was a terrorist, and arguably--it's a book I just finished--one can find the origins of modern terrorism in this guy, who is called mile Henry. This will fit into Paris. It's obviously sort of a sub-theme in this course, and so is the state and capitalism. This particular person, mile Henry, set out to bomb and to kill. His targets changed the name of the game for terrorists. That's obviously what I can't wait to talk about. But first I'm going to just review briefly for you, it's getting briefer every second that I think about this, the socialist stuff, which you can read about. With the rise of mass politics in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, there was the rise of mass socialist parties. Basically just to review: there are two kinds of socialism. There were the revolutionary socialists, of which Marx was an obvious example and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, a name you don't have to retain, who brought Marxist theory to France, who believed that revolution would come when the proletariat was class-conscious and after a bourgeois revolution, of which he basically thought 1848 had been a good example following in 1789. And the

proletariat would rise up and break their chains and bring this brave new world. And, so, there were revolutionary socialists in Italy, in Spain, and in France, and even a few in Germany. Reform socialists said, "Look, states are becoming stronger and stronger, and can break revolutions very easily. Look what happened to the Paris Commune of 1871 when about 25,000 people are massacred, men, women and children are gunned down, and that the way to bringing social reform and abolishing the abuses of capitalism is through reform." This is the reformist tradition in Germany. It's identified with somebody who's in the book, Edouard Bernstein. And you can see this in the growth of the SPD, the German Socialist Reformist Party, which was the largest party in the Reichstag in 1914 when war breaks out. What you do is if you organize, you can--legislatures, if you have enough socialists and enough well-meaning other people in the legislatures, in the Reichstag, or in the Chambre des Dputs, or the other parliaments in places that had parliaments, then you can vote in laws. You can vote in mine safety regulations, because mining accidents killed so many people. There's one in the Pas de Calais where hundreds and hundreds of people, a thousand people get killed in one accident in about 1910 or 1911. You can pass an eight-hour day or a ten-hour day. You can pass laws making it harder and harder to employ children, particularly in dangerous tasks. You can do things for women. You could do things for families. If you elect the right kind of people, you can have a revolution through reform, through the ballot. And the great socialist leaders such as Bernstein, whom I just mentioned, or the great Jean Jaurs, whose death on the 31st of July in 1914 was really the end of an era and the beginning of another era, a scary era of the war--people had that sense. He was the one who in France unified the reform socialists and the revolutionary socialists, though there are still fissures in their approaches. Of course, the old revolutionary socialists would become the Communists after 1920, when the French Communist Party is begun in the wake of the Russian Revolution, which seemed to be, even though it was a revolution in a very complex situation, that seemed to say that you can have a revolution. But anyway, reform socialists dominate in Germany. They dominate in France. They dominate in Belgium. The Socialist Party is terribly important in Italy; they become more important in Spain as well. Those are the two big traditions. Some of the tensions between revolutionary socialists and reform socialists can be seen in the fact that revolutionary socialists said, "Look, if you are working in the Reichstag and you're trying to get better insurance plans," ironically it was Bismarck's Germany that gives really the first substantial insurance program for workers, "what you're doing is you're propping up the bourgeois state. You're buying into it. You're supporting indirectly their armies that crush

workers and strikes," and they did in the heroic age of syndicalism, but more about that in a minute, 1895 to about 1907 in France. But in other countries it's about the same thing. "You're propping up the bourgeois state by participating in electoral politics." But lots of revolutionary socialists, and this is all in the book so don't worry about this, but a lot of them say, "Look, if we don't run candidates and elections, how are they going to know about us?" So, they, too, would run candidates and elections. So, they're put at really kind of coinc. They're really sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, because they're running candidates in elections in which they do not believe. I'm not here talking about Russia, because that is more complicated with the Bolsheviks, and the Mensheviks, and the socialist revolutionaries, and we will come back to them. I'm talking basically about Western Europe. You have to imagine that Lenin and the other Russian socialists are sort of walking around the lakes of Geneva and of Zurich in exile and trying to imagine this future. But that's the big difference between socialists, reform and revolutionary. Now, to make things even more complicated, you have a group called the syndicalists. The word "syndicalist" is an English word which I sent along on your friendly email from yours truly. Syndicalist, the word comes from the French word for unions, which is a syndicat. What they said is, "Hang on." They kind of believed with the revolutionary socialists, saying, "If you get involved in electoral process, you are propping up this corrupt bourgeois state. You are propping up this dynamic duo of the state and capitalism." Syndicalists say, "Look, we will organize from the ground up, beginning in the shop floor, the factory. That will be not only a means to obtain a revolution, it's a way of seeing what the future world will be like when everybody tutoies everybody or Dus everybody. The kind of relations, the friendly equal relations of the shop floor become, after the revolution, the way the world will be organized." In the South of Europe, in Italy and in Spain, these folks are called, and I sent this around to you, anarcho-syndicalists. You see a transition here. Anarcho-syndicalists. Because they're rejecting the state and they're looking in the future, the decentralized organization is part of it. Anarcho-syndicalists have considerable influence in Spain and Italy. They believe in direct action, and sabotage, and strikes, but in union organization. One of the most interesting--I mention him in the book-Fernand Pelloutier, who wrote a book called The Dying Society, was one of the theoreticians of anarcho-syndicalism, of syndicalism. He was dying. He was dying of TB. Though he was not a worker, tuberculosis was a working-class disease. Go to Pennsylvania. Go to West

Virginia. Tuberculosis, the ravages of the mines in the United States, were just incredible. In porcelain factories and all sorts of places, glass factories all over the place. Pelloutier creates these things called labor exchanges. He's one of the people who come to these things called labor exchanges, bourse de travail, you call them in French, which were towns where you had municipal socialists in power at the municipal level--and you did, in some cities, are giving municipal funds to start these labor exchanges which are buildings. You can still see them. When I was invited to Limoges to give a big talk by the Confderation Gnral du Travail, we started the apro, the first round of drinks, about noon in the labor exchange, in the maison du peuple, the house of the people. They were places where workers coming from other places could come and get a meal, get some money and, above all, find out about jobs. So, syndicalists--the way they imagine the future, and preparing for this brave new world of post-revolutionary relationships, that has an important privileged place in the way they view the world. There was an engineer called Georges Sorel, whose name I should have send around, S-O-RE-L. He comes to the notion of the general strike. One day all workers will simply put down their tools and say, "Hell with you, capitalism. Hell with you, the State. And they will bring capitalism to its knees." It doesn't really ever work out that way, does it? The capitalists and the State win the day. So, having rushed through all of that, let me talk about what I want to talk about. That is anarchism, of which there is only a couple short, and I hope sprightly, paragraphs in which you're reading. I am not an anarchist. Sometimes when I give talks at various places--I was at St. Louis recently, and other places, people at the end will think-hopefully, they'll never think I'm a terrorist, because I'm certainly not, and when I talk about this guy I do not do so with affection or admiration. But I know him because I followed him around. I followed him around. Most anarchists were not terrorists. One wants to make that clear. It's not surprising that the great strengths of anarchism are in Spain in Catalonia and in Andalusia in the south of Spain and in southern Italy. Why? Because that's where the Italian and the Spanish states have very limited success in convincing people that they're Spanish or Italian. Why should they believe they're Spanish or Italian? Southern Italians thought that the republic was a monarchy. But the progressive monarchy, so called, was a plot launched by tax collectors and industrial capitalists in the North of Italy. In Andalusia and in Catalonia were the Civil Guard, who tended to be from Galicia, a conservative part of Spain where the odious Franco was from or from Castile, a huge area around Madrid. It was easy to see how they associated the state with

something that they didn't want. In writing about anarchism, I tried to put myself and tried to think of how anarchists viewed the world. I want to tell you a story that's a true story. If you're trying to imagine how anarchists viewed the world, this story is not a bad one. It's about a cork worker making corks for bottles of sherry in the south of Spain. He's dying. He'd been an anarchist his entire life. He hated the state. He hated capitalism. He hated the church. He's dying. He's on his deathbed. He had married a woman from a religiously practicing Catholic family. In the scene in this room in which he's dying, in one part of the room is his family, who hated organized religion, who view it as a prop for capitalism and the state. On the other side of the room are people who are not so sure. They went to church sometimes. They knew the priest. When he's lying there, the end is near. His wife's family says, "Pedro, don't you want me to bring a lawyer in? A lawyer who will take your last will." Anarchists don't have wills and they don't have very much property. The other side of the room is just utter terror, horror. How can they suggest such a thing, that Pedro is going to make a will? That's a bourgeois thing to do, to make a will. Then somebody else from his wife's family says, "Pedro, the end is near. Don't you want us to get a priest for the last rights?" He'd never set foot in a church and proudly so. Consternation on the other side of the room. How will it all end? How will Pedro end his life? With a lawyer and a priest? So, Pedro looks up and he says, "Go and get me a lawyer. Bring me a lawyer." Then he says, "Go and tell father," the priest, "to come to see me." Joy--utter consternation. Pedro's lying in a bed in the middle. So, pretty soon the lawyer comes dressed in his little suit. He doesn't yet have a calculator to tote up the bill, but he's got his legal pad. He's never been in that house before. He comes down by the bed and he says, "Pedro, you have a few possessions, a fork, a knife, a couple of plates. Don't you want to give me your will now?" Pedro says, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute, seor. Wait a minute." Then the priest comes. He has his purple--I remember this from Jesuit high school days--thing that they wear on Easter. He has his little case also, which he has the holy oil to bless Pedro and give him the last rights. He comes close and he says, "Pedro, the end is near. You've led a good life, but I haven't seen you in church very much or ever, for that matter. Your children are not baptized. Don't you want to make a confession? You're going to meet your maker soon. Don't you want to make a confession to me right now? Nobody can hear you. Don't you have something you want to tell me? Isn't there something you can tell me?" Consternation on one side, silent joy on the other. Pedro says to the lawyer, "Come here, seor. I want you to stand on the left side of my bed." He says to the priest, "Father,

come here please. I want you to stand on the right side of my bed." Then he smiles a smile of utter contempt. He says, "Now you can all see both sides of the family. Like Christ, I am dying between two thieves." And he died. To imagine the kind of hate that anarchists had of soldiers, and priests, and of officials, and of Castilian Guardia Civil, that was how anarchism was born. When was anarchism born? There's a couple antecedents in the eighteenth century, but they're terribly irrelevant people that hardly anyone read, including a British one. It really starts with Proudhon, a name a sent around. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He was from the east of France, from Besanon, in the mountainous Franche-Comt. He believed that if you didn't have the state, the people could live pretty much as with a little bit of prosperity that they had, a few chickens, a little piece of land. People tended to live like that there. It was a place where nobody had very much but everybody had enough to get along. He writes the following. It's in my lecture notes. To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censored, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed at every operation at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished, under the pretext of public utility in the name of the general interest to be placed under taxes, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, poached, and robbed. At the slightest resistance or the first word of complaint to be repressed, fired, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government. That is its justice. That is its morality. He wrote a pamphlet in 1841 called What is Property? His answer is, "Property is theft." He didn't mean that all property was theft. What he meant was too much property was theft, or unearned property was theft. Proudhon had lots of influence among some peasants, but mostly artisans. In the world, by the way, that the great painter, Gustave Courbet painted a lot, in the area around Besanon or Nantes, lots of really marvelous paintings of people at work, the stone breakers and people just working their guts out for very little. Proudhon, in 1848, it's said he went down in Paris and put a brick on a barricade and threw up, nauseated by the thought of violence, of revolution. His successors, sort of the leaders of the anarchist movements, were Mikhail Bakunin, an enormously tall, bearded, heavy-drinking, heavy-eating, heavy-sweating Russian noble, a

prince who was an anarchist who said, "The revolution will come. It will come with a single spark and all the hundreds of millions of toilers, the serfs will rise up, and they will slay their social betters, and create this new brave world based upon their village harmonies." He said, "Destruction is a creative passion," entre guillemets. Destruction is a creative passion. In 1848 he led police on a merry chase. He spent time in the Russian slammer. He escapes through Japan, goes through the United States and ends up back in London, terrified people. His image, this is before photographs or photographs are just starting out, and there are photographs of him. He met Marx, whom he hated, and Marx hated him. He thought that Marx was ruining class struggle, was ruining revolution by preaching over and over again about waiting for revolution. Class-conscious workers. What you need is peasants to rise up as they had in Pugachev's rebellion, and all the other rebellions in the early seventeenth and eighteenth century. He dies in the early 1870s, a phenomenal character. The other Russian, a gentle man, a geographer, Peter Kropotkin, K-R-O-P-O-T-K-I-N, is in the book. He wrote a pamphlet called The Anarchist Morality. When you get rid of the state, people are basically good. Anarchists believe that people are good. There's a tradition from Rousseau, by the way, there too. Rousseau, who lived in the east of France, or what would become France, around Chambry, who believed in the primitive. Anarchists believe that primitive social relations and even primitive ways of producing things, just associations you enter in because you want to, were the future. Kropotkin, who at the end of his life was once toasted by the king of England, and who had turned against the Russian Revolution--he died in, I think, 1921 or 1922. He was terrified, just disgusted by the Russian Revolution, which was already creating a centralized state. That's what he hated. He hated states. "You must destroy the state." But he was a gentle man. Yet he and a guy called Paul Brousse, you don't have to remember, who became a socialist leader and then went nuts later-that's not a very clinical term, but he had big problems later--they create the term "propaganda by the deed." What is a deed? A deed is a bomb. A deed is an attack. It's the murder of an official. The anarchists weren't the only ones doing this stuff. There was a Russian group, briefly mentioned, called Narodnaya Volya, who believed in kind of a hierarchical post-revolutionary system. What they wanted to do was set out and kill officials. But so did the anarchist terrorists. They killed officials, one of which you've heard of already. You've probably heard of some of the others. President McKinley in 1901, Buffalo, New York, is killed by somebody who received funds from an anarchist organization in Patterson, New Jersey, I think, or is that Bresci? Anyway, Bresci kills King Umberto I of

Italy, another anarchist assassination. They kill five or six leaders during this period of anarchist heyday really, the late nineteenth century. King Umberto I of Italy said that he considered assassination a professional risk. There were two attempts on his life and the third one nails him. Alexander II, who liberated the serfs, is killed when he gets out of a sled to look at a bomb that doesn't work. Elizabeth, the empress of Austria-Hungary, who couldn't stand Franz Joseph and lived apart from him, is assassinated as well. But most anarchists were not killers. Now, if you think of American history, those of you who had Glenda's course, or David Blight's, other people here, you might know about Haymarket, the Haymarket affair in the 1880s. There they hanged four anarchists who were called les pendus in France. They had enormous influence. The les pendus were the hanged, as they're swinging in the breeze in a Chicago prison yard. They were anarchists and they inspire someone like Emma Goldman, who was a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the United States, who becomes an important American anarchist. Anarchists set off to kill policemen, or to kill heads of state, or to kill generals; propaganda by the deed, the spark that will ignite this revolution. But the man you see before you--and I have become today a very modern man. I want to tell you, because this is my first try at PowerPoint. The person that you see before you is the guy I've been following around. I got interested in him for two reasons. One is that he is the first, really, along with a bombing at an opera in Barcelona, the Liceo to target ordinary people. To say that people of a social class were guilty because they were who they were. The spark does not necessarily have to be lit by killing a head of a state. Sadi Carnot, who would get his in 1894 on the Rue de la Rpublique in Lyon, president of France. He takes the decision to kill ordinary people. Lots of terrorists since then have taken that decision. A classic example is insurgents in Punjab in India in the 1920s, bombing officers' clubs. There's a terrifying scene in that fantastic, but very difficult movie--because of the torture scene, I can't even use it in the French History course, The Battle of Algiers. You are with this woman who's planting a bomb in a caf and she sees the people who are going to die. She sees babies with their mothers. She sees people having a drink in the French community there. She takes the decision to place the bomb. I believe that it kind of started with this guy. This is, again, not somebody I admire. I know him. Everywhere he's lived I've been. I guess if you're going to write a book about somebody as a prism on something or other, it's good to pick somebody who only lived to be twenty-one, because it's a shorter book. He was guillotined in May 1894.

Again, I do not admire him, but I'm going to tell you about him anyway. With the help of PowerPoint! How in the hell do I do this? I've got to remember how to do this. All right. That's mile Henry. His father was a communard who was condemned to death, somebody who'd fought in the Commune. So, this guy is born in Spain. His father contracted mercury poisoning in Spain, and comes back to France after the amnesty and dies. He has an older brother and a younger brother. What he does is, on a day in 1894, he sets out with a bomb and he walks in the fancy boulevards that, for him, represent all of the class differences between wealthy and poor people, center versus periphery and all of that. He goes down to the Caf Terminus, which is on your right. It's those awnings there near the Gare Saint-Lazare. I've had the rather odd experience of twice, once with friends and once with my son, having eaten in the restaurant that my book subject blew up, because it's still there, and sitting at the same table. He goes to four or five cafes, but there are not enough innocent people in them. So, he goes to the Terminus where there is a gypsy orchestra playing, pays for two beers. That seems a little odd, anarchist paying for a beer, because the right to theft was something that they still believed in, many of them, not all. Most were not terrorists, remember that. He goes into the Caf Terminus. He gets a cigar. He lights the fuse. He throws it toward a chandelier and it blows up, killing one and wounding about eighteen people. That's not him. This anarchist is called Malatesta, who doesn't look particularly scary there. mile Henry had gone back to the Paris region. His mother had a very pitiful auberge. This is the era of bomb attacks in the early 1890s. That's a marmite, as bombs were sometimes called. He became an anarchist. His brother had already become an anarchist. To put yourself into the early 1890s in Paris, ordinary people, but not so much as the elites, were terrified of anarchist bombers. Ravachol, a name I sent around, who was a poor, pathetic in many ways but extremely poor guy who'd been sent out to beg by his mother. They had almost no money. They're from a place called Saint-Chamond, near Saint-tienne. Ravachol was a counterfeiter and finally a murderer. He suffocates to death a hermit who had a mini fortune hidden in his bizarre cottage near Saint-tienne. He escapes from the police and he goes to Paris. In 1891 police beat the hell out of three anarchists in a march, a rather one-sided brawl. Two of them are condemned to big-time sentences. Ravachol decides to go and to kill the prosecuting attorney. He places a bomb, not knowing where the apartment was, and the bomb blows up. Then he set other bombs, too. After having done this, he goes to a restaurant, and he eats rather well, and he engages a waiter in conversation. He tries to convince the waiter to be an anarchist. The waiter sees he has a scar on his left hand, Ravachol did. Then he stupidly goes back later and eats in the same restaurant. Instead of bringing the second course, the

waiter brings the police. After a tremendous struggle, Ravachol is captured, put on trial for his life, and he memorably holds up--how do you work this thing?--anyway, he is guillotined. He's really kind of a bastard. More than that, and he killed other people too, probably. But he finally is guillotined. Two things happened, not only in Paris but in other places. The people of means living in the fancy quarters are extremely frightened. There are all sorts of death threats that get sent around. Ravachol, to those anarchist terrorists, he becomes a martyr. Look, here his head is framed by the guillotine. Ravachol, who had been betrayed by an anarchist friend, dies at age thirty-three. Christ died at age thirty-three, betrayed by a friend. So, he becomes this sort of, for radical anarchists, he becomes a vision of how life should be. There are songs called La Ravachol. There's another one called The Dynamite Polka, being sung. Dynamite, from the point of view of anarchists, leveled the playing field. They viewed dynamite rather as the way in which muskets helped end the domain of feudalism. It levels the playing field. Dynamite, after all, was invented by whom? By Nobel, as in the Nobel Prize. So the people who support dynamite in French are called the dynamitards, the dynamiters. The Dynamite Polka. In Montmartre, where you have a lot of anarchist writers and artists. Pizarro is an anarchist. The literary and art critic, above all art, Flix Fnon, who was a friend of mile Henry, is an anarchist as well. So, it's into this world that the young mile Henry. Here you go. Here's this one. I've read hundreds of these things that said, "You've always been hard with your domestics. You're going to be blown up. Death to the riches." There are hundreds of these things. They're sent all over Paris, not just the fancy neighborhoods. There, hundreds and hundreds of times, at the airports you hear these explosions sometimes as they blow up suitcases that haven't been claimed. That's the first known machine that blows up suspect items, including lots of bad jokes--sardine cans with a little bit of powder left in them, and that kind of thing. It's in this world that Emile Henry learns to hate, and that he certainly does. That's where his mom had herauberge. Ironically, it's near Euro Disney now, but then it was a village. That's not the one. It was up the street a little bit. I did follow him around, you can see. There's his mother there. Up on the right is one of the places he lived, always around, except for one occasion, Montmartre. That's his girlfriend. He had unrequited love. She had the disadvantage of being married to another anarchist. He writes her clumsy poems. He falls in love with her. She blows him off. But in the end, she wanted to take full credit before the press for having been the lover of mile Henry after his deeds, his bombs, but he wasn't. That's one of the places he worked in

Paris. I love that. That's a beautiful sign and that company hasn't existed since World War I. But you can follow him around. In 1892, mile Henry, two years earlier, he had killed before. There was a strike in the south of France, glassworkers in Camaux. The third block on the left is number eleven and that's where the company is. They found a bomb there placed about 11:00 in the morning. Right there. That's not the way it looked then. I've gotten in there twice to see where he placed the bomb. My son gets a little tired. "Dad, do we have to look at another one of these places?" They find the bomb and they carry it down to the police station, which is still there. It was a reversible bomb, which means when the chemicals run together, boom! It kills five people terribly, five policeman and a secretary among them. Body parts all over the place. Emile Henry, that's one of the places he lived. He is eliminated from the list of suspects because they said he could not have gone on the two errands his boss sent that day from near the station of the north, down toward the center of Paris, then up toward the Arc de Triomphe, gone back to Montmartre and gotten the bomb, placed the bomb, and gotten back in two hours and fifteen minutes. When he went on trial for his life in 1894, a detective said, "Yes, he could have done that in two hours and fifteen minutes." So, being a bit of an empiricist, I did it. And I replaced tramway and Omnibus with a bus and with a Metro. I never take cabs, but I took, instead of a carriage--of course I didn't take that--I took a cab and I subtracted eleven minutes when my cab couldn't turn left on the Avenue de l'Opra. He did it. There's no question about it. In fact, when they did the reconstitution of this building, he knew every single part of this building. He did it. There's no question about it. Why did he hate so? Part of it again, this is the theme we've talked about before, was the social geography of Paris. Everywhere he lived, with one exception that you just saw, was in people's Paris. All of the facades are still there. That's where he lived on the Rue Vron, on the very top floor. That's where the poor lived. He gets the bomb there in 1892. They hated Sacr-Coeur, for reasons you already know. It was a symbol of penance for the FrancoPrussian War and penance for the commune. His father was one of the people condemned to death, who was lucky enough to get out and not be executed. In a Zola novel that's very underappreciated called Paris, published in 1898, it's about a priest who, to take an REM song, is "losing his religion." His brother is an anarchist, Guillaume. He has fantasies about blowing this place up. I think it's ugly as hell. I once went with my wife to see where they cast the huge bell that would drive people nuts and still does, called la Savoyarde. But that bell wasn't there. But as a symbol, you can't walk around Montmartre and not see it from various places. He becomes a terrorist because the people that he sees around

him are very, very poor, and he convinces himself, even though he's an intellectual, he's a bourgeois. He could have gotten into the cole Polytechnique, which is a super, Grande cole. It's a big engineering school. He's a great student. He's an intellectual. That's the other thing. Besides picking "innocent people." All people are innocent, but you know what I mean. The other thing is he is not a sad sack or a dangerous one like Ravachol. He is not a guy called Vaillant, who places a little, teeny tack bomb and throws it in the Chamber of Deputies to call attention to the plight of the poor, and is guillotined. The first person in the nineteenth century guillotined who did not kill somebody. This guy goes out to kill. There's a scene in an old Balzac novel called--all Balzac novels by definition are old, obviously--Old Goriot, Pre Goriot, in which Rastignac, who was sort of this down-and-out noble who wants to make the big time in Paris by sleeping with all the right people. After Goriot dies, he's up in the northeast quadrant of Paris at Pre Lachaise cemetery. He waves his hand down toward the fancy quarters, down ironically near where Caf Terminus would be. The fancy quarters, even before there are boulevards, and he says the equivalent of, "It's war between you and me now, baby." That's a rough translation, but that's what he said. mile Henry, walking around on the hills and seeing people walk down to be domestics, because they couldn't afford to take the tramway or the Omnibus, horse-drawn carriages. He waves his hand and says, "It's war between you and me, baby, and I will ignite the spark that kills you MFs right away." That's what he does. When he walked out of his apartment, he looked down and happily he didn't have to see the Tour Montparnasse, which hadn't been built after huge payoffs in the early 1970s. Disgusting! But what he could see were these symbols of capitalism, the state, and the church. What did he see? He saw the Eiffel Tower, which was five years old, a symbol of the republic and the bourgeois revolution, as he saw it. He sees the Pantheon, where they buried all these Napoleonic marshals who basically got a lot of people killed if they didn't get themselves killed. And he sees Notre Dame. He says, "It's war between you and me." This is the faade. I love this stuff. The inside building where he lived isn't there anymore. Now it's kind of an area that's a little bit sketchy. There's a lot of drug dealing. When I got myself into there, I had to kind of--I didn't want to look like a plainclothes policeman. Do I risk looking like a plainclothes policeman? No. I didn't want to look like a tourist sort of slumming. I don't look like that much, either. When I went by these guys who were sort of hanging out there, I said, "Salut les gars," or "Hi guys, what's up?" I got myself in there to see

where he once had lived. The point of that is that you can see what he saw. That gate is exactly the same as that day when he walked out to kill for the second time. His bomb that he threw into the Terminus--this is back in 1894, this is where we started. It hit a chandelier and exploded. He said at his trial that he threw it too low. He should have thrown it higher; it would have killed more people. Only one died. He'd already killed five before. People are terrified. They run all over the place. It was speculated that his was sort of an indirect suicide, because his unrequited love, this lady who lived in the Boulevard Voltaire, whose name was Elisa. But no, because he tries to escape in order to kill again. They chase him and they catch him. A barber helps catch him. A controller on the tramway hits him with the control mechanism that punches tickets, just like in the old days on those things, not that I ever was in a horse-drawn carriage. They get him and they take him. He's arrested for murder, mile Henry, and is put on trial. That's where he's writing his mother. We know a lot about him, because they kept all these documents. It was so fun doing this. I love stuff like that. His mother was devastated, as you can well imagine. She cannot believe that her mile could have done this. He was her pride and joy after the death of the father. Those of you who have been to Paris will recognize this. This is the Conciergerie. This is where Louis XVI, Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, and others awaited, they put their head between the little window, as they used to say, la petite fentre, to be guillotined. It's also got one of the three most magnificent gothic halls anywhere in France. His guards took notes every single day about what he said and the anarchist songs. They want to prove that somebody else was involved in this. There probably was somebody else in the 1892 attack who helped him close the bomb. So, Emile Henry goes on trial in April of 1894. He makes the famous declaration in which he says, "You have hung us in Chicago," Haymarket; "You have garroted us," that's slowly strangling us, "in Barcelona." When Franco was croaking in 1975, they were garroting an anarchist even at that time, 1975 in Barcelona. "You have shot us in Germany." I don't know how they killed them in Italy, but, "You've killed us in Italy." He says, "You, the bourgeois, who are in this caf, you are not innocent. It's because of you, the petty bourgeois. You support les gros," the big ones, "on every possible occasion. You forget about us when your factory owners throw us out when we can no longer work any longer, or women workers happy not to have had to prostitute themselves in order to pay their rent and their husbands' rent by the end of the month. But what you can never do is destroy anarchism. Its roots are too deep." On the 22nd of May 1894--that's what I said about writing a book about somebody that doesn't live very long--he is executed at Place Roquette in Paris, which was, by intent, the place

where the state meted out justice, right in the heart of working-class Paris. That was not an idle selection of a space. We have his notes up to the very end of his life. This guy, Deibler, is the executioner. Monsieur de Paris. This is the executioner meting out, in quotes, "justice." Public execution, by the way, in France, maybe I said this already, was in 1936 at Versailles-the last execution was in 1974. I'm constantly asked by people all sorts of political opinions in France, where executions, public capital punishment is repudiated by most everybody, how that we still have it here. This is not a political diatribe, so I won't say anything about that. Anyway, Deibler, his son was the last public executioner, did the last public execution back when. There he is. There's somebody else putting their head through the little window. That's what I mean by that. That's the equivalent of his mug shot. So, he was wrong about the roots of anarchism being too deep. What clearly happens is that there was a trial during that same summer where they put a lot of intellectuals on trial who did nothing except to say that they were anarchists or to criticize the state. What my book--it's really a book also about state terrorists. It's about the overreaction of states. Our state is a good example of that, and the tendency to try to denigrate anyone who doesn't agree with us as being terrorists, whether they were or not. The intellectuals, the jury sees through it in 1894 and only a couple thieves are condemned and them not to death. There's anarchists in 1968 in Paris. There's a band of anarchists in about 1909, 1910, 1911, that hold up stores with most modern tools, shotguns and things like that. The anarchist attacks were over. There was no question about that. That doesn't make mile Henry less interesting. As an intellectual, the cross-class kind of--you see this in Middle-Eastern terrorism, too. My book is also about state terrorists. What stops anarchist attacks in Spain is the fact that the public becomes aware that the police were hideously torturing people who did not agree with the politics of the State. They were torturing them. You see where one could go in a political diatribe, which this isn't. In Italy when the state overreacts, anarchist attacks virtually end. Now, anarchism does not end in Spain. It does not end also for reasons that are perfectly clear already in Buenos Aires. There's still a huge anarchist community of exiles from these Western European countries from all over the place living in London, ironically in one of the more chi-chi parts of London which was then very poor, around Charlotte Street, where you can't afford to have a pint of beer anymore. That's where they live. So, he was wrong about that. The roots of anarchism were too great. But the connection that I want to make, obviously, especially since this is being filmed it's not the place to do it, but when states, including our own, overreact, what they tend to do is to lash out in ways, and imprison

unjustly, and torture, and don't give legal rights. What they do is tend to increase the number of those people who despise us. If you look back, and again the commune is not a bad way of thinking about this, somebody figured out that of all the victims of terrorist attacks, no matter how you define them, the ratio between victims of overreaction by states to victims of anarchist terror--and I'm not apologizing for anarchist terror. I hate it. I'm not apologizing for terror of any kind. I hate it. But the ratio was 260:1. I suppose there's a lesson to be learned there somewhere. But it was fun to follow Emile Henry around, even though I don't admire him, and to try to give you a sense of how people felt when they hated in the 1890s. Their answer was not the same answer as socialists, which are to take power mostly through electoral processes, but to smash the state by blowing it up. See you on Monday. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 15 Transcript October 27, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: All right. I'm going to talk about imperialism today. This complements the chapter in the book. The main topic is the New Imperialism, and the lecture is very much about the culture of imperialism. Part of the age of mass politics in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, before World War I, involved massive support for the New Imperialism. What was new about the New Imperialism? What period do we talk about as having had the New Imperialism? It's really from the mid-1880s, just say the 1880s, to 1914. It's at that point, as you can see from the maps in the book and you can see from the discussion, that the European powers really conquer the world. There's no other way to put it. There's a frenetic, wild chase even to the South Pole as part of that. The African continent, of which there were huge blanks in the maps of Africa, by 1914 virtually the entire continent was not only charted but had been conquered. Europeans really control the globe. The Americans, in a smaller way, are part of the New Imperialism. Let me just start out by posing the question, and I sent all this stuff around to you, so I don't have to scribble on the board and you don't have to try to figure out what it is that's written on the board, because it's hard to see from here. If you were going to point out or to claim that there was a central reason for the New Imperialism, why even Bismarck, who described colonies as an albatross around the neck of Germany while he gets into the kind of feeding frenzy himself, it's been put rather cleverly by a guy called Baumgar a long time ago, that it comes down to God, gold, and glory.

There were those who interpreted the mad quest for colonies as being the missionary impulse. A sort of subset of this would be the French idea that there was a civilizing mission going on and trying to give indigenous peoples access to French culture. Basically it argues that Dutch Calvinist ministers, and Lutheran ministers, and Catholic priests, and other denominations encouraged states and their own church people to bring to their religion indigenous peoples all over the place. Well, we can dispense with that one. That was part of it, of course. You can't distinguish any of these three and say that any of them are nul. But that is a rather small part of the quest for yet more colonies in the New Imperialism, and indeed for all of the wellmeant, however condescending in many cases, quest for religious conversion. Most of the Lutheran ministers and Dutch Calvinist ministers in Southeast Asia, and Catholic priests all over the place such as Vietnam--my friend Charles Keith just finished a dissertation on Catholic Vietnam in the 1920s--most of those priests in areas such as Africa were there to tend to the religious needs of the European communities. It was particularly true of, for example, Lutheran ministers in German Southwest Africa and in other places. The drive to convert peoples to organized European religions was probably greatest, and the Vietnam case is a very good one, and the role of the Catholic Church is extremely interesting in Vietnam and the origins of Vietnamese nationalism. But that is another story. The second one was gold. Gee, I put a "d" for the "o" in gold, but it's spelled G-O-L-D usually. I said in what you're reading that if you get Karl Marx, if he ever sat together with Hobson, a very major economic thinker whom I describe in there, if they were having dinner, there would be a lot that was uncomfortable about the dinner. But they would really agree. They would say that the New Imperialism, of which obviously Hobson was a great critic, emerged out of the quest for riches, for resources. Part of Marxism and part of Leninism, an important part was that imperialism is sort of the final stage of the development of capitalism, and that states need new markets. They need new resources. Therefore, they set out to, at a time of economic crisis--nothing like now, but there is a depression that lasts from 1874 to the mid-1890s--they set out to find new riches. The people going up the Niger River, for example, where I've been in Mali, they expected to find gold around the next bend, or more peanut oil, or diamonds, because of the diamonds in South Africa, which was the equivalent of the gold rush in the U.S. in about 1848 in California. Hobson was no Marxist at all. And he was a critic of the brutality of the New Imperialism, which I'll talk about in a minute. But he said, "If you want to find out where this all began, you look at high finance in the City," the City being the City in London,

Westminster, where the high rollers, and the bankers, and the big capitalists are. There are the origins of the New Imperialism. Now, there were critics of the New Imperialism. Most of them, but not all, were in Britain. Many of them opposed the New Imperialism because of the brutality exerted on indigenous peoples by the imperial power. There was a real wave of opposition, for example, to imperialism that swept through Britain and London in 1900 in what they called the Khaki Election, khaki because it was the color of the uniforms of many of the British soldiers in hot climates. Some of the opposition in the liberal party were opposed, ran on a campaign of antiimperialism. They were just wiped away. They were just absolutely swept away in the elections of 1900. Ordinary people in Britain thrilling to the accounts of colonial exploits voted overwhelmingly for the conservatives who just blow the liberals out of the water, and the labor party exists in 1900, but is not yet a major force. Imperialism carries the day. The big parades in London of returning soldiers from the Boer War in South Africa and from other wars, from all the wars, they are greeted as conquering heroes nowhere more frenetically, enthusiastically, exuberantly than the City, because there is a link between big finance, big capital and imperialism. Besides that, we have a category we call social imperialism. The imperialist power saw imperialism as part of the overall strategy of conquests. They said, "Look, if you've got economic problems at home and you've got a lot of unemployed workers--also in France--if you've got a lot of unemployed workers who happen to be socialists, or in Italy, that you could kind of export your problems, because you can point people in the direction and say, 'Hey, times are tough here. But if you go to Algeria, we'll rip off some Arab land for you and you'll be just fine.' Or 'You can go make it rich in Vietnam.' Or 'You can go to Kenya or to Ghana,' (or what would become Kenya or Ghana). 'You can export your social problems.'" This is sort of what New Imperialism meant. A classic case would be the insurrection of 1851. This is backing up before the New Imperialism. What do they do with the people who are arrested after the insurrection of 1851? A lot of them are sent to Algeria. You export your "social and political problems." The irony there, amazing delicious irony, is their great, great, great, great, great grandchildren end up being right-wing supporters of the National Front, and before that of various right-wing groups that believe in French Algeria and who try to keep the French from leaving Algeria in the early 1960s, after the Algerian war of independence. So, social imperialism is seen by sort of the economic canon, that is, the way of thinking about the political economy of these countries, as a way of keeping things calm at home. They say, "Give people opportunities. Send them to these foreign places." Geez, in the case of

France I remember reading these gripping, just pathetic stories of these people who just can't make it in the area in which we live in the south of France. They pack up all their stuff and they walk. They walk or they get little push carts, try to get to Avignon, try to get to Marseilles, try to get a boat to get to Morocco, or Tunisia, or Algeria, to try to make a living there. This, too, is part of social imperialism and is part of the idea that somehow social imperialism is economically determined. That it's the final stage of capitalism. Is that the biggest reason? No. But it's damn important. The biggest reason has to do with the entangling alliances and great power rivalries. It's represented best by Fashoda, at the end of the 1890s, where a British force stumbles into a French force in the middle of Sudan and they say nasty things to each other, finally toast each other with what drinks they had brought along and their countries almost go to war, because the flag would be tarnished by losing out to the craven reptiles that you just stumbled into in the Sudan. The New Imperialism is one of the fundamental causes of World War I, period. That is the biggest reason. Now, don't get rid of the gold interpretation completely, because obviously as Britain and Germany become huge economic rivals, big economic rivals, as the Germans are not only nipping at the heels of the city, British industrial production and British naval production, but passing them in things like chemistry, and production of steel, and the production of big battleships. All this stuff runs together. Your victory is your craven reptile opponent's loss. That's the way they viewed it. Most people, I'll talk about this on Wednesday. It's fun to talk about, sad but also fun. Most people in the 1890s thought that the next war would involve France and Britain. They'll be fighting again and their rivals here and there. Or they thought that maybe the British and the Russians would fight because they're rivals in what was called the "Great Game" for north of India, and Afghanistan, and all of that. Basically, glory and the great power rivalries is the biggest reason that Germany gets into the imperial game, for example. Bismarck--it's the famous Bismarck story--a really awful man. But when there's an imperial lobby comes racing along and says, "Look, Herr Chancellor, we really need to have the troops go and protect our merchants." People like the sort of freelance guy, Karl Peters. He said at one point, he slams down a map of Europe on the table and he says, "That's my map of Africa. Here we are and we're surrounded by Russia and France." But toward the end of his career was completely different. He's backing up German merchants with expeditionary forces. Plant the flag and then you'd better defend it. The big issue there is rivalry with France and with Russia. Bismarck says, "Geez, if we can get the French interested in all these colonies in Africa, then they won't be dreaming of re-

conquering Alsace and much of Lorraine." At the end he says, "Well, we'd better be out there, too." And they're all out there. As some wag once puts it, Italy gets into the game, too, with Libya and Ethiopia, with "a huge appetite and bad teeth," as someone once put it. Of course, they get defeated in the battle in 1896. Then they will pay them back with poison gas and cascades of bombs in the 1930s, and just destroy everybody and kill them all, if they can, to pay them back for their defeat in 1896. I am eventually going to talk about the culture of imperialism and give you the example, which I find telling, of Robert Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scouts. You didn't associate the Boy Scouts with imperialism, but you will in a minute. First, let me just say that this is not some sort of '70s radical guy saying--there he goes again, "it's really nasty to be slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people." But it is nasty, and that's what they did. That cannot be forgotten. It doesn't just start with the famous case of the Germans in Southwest Africa. More about that in a minute. Bugeaud, the name is quite forgettable but who's a general from Limoges. The French conqueror Algiers anyway in 1830 is a political diversion. Gradually they expand their control over Algeria. Algeria becomes a colony. It becomes an integral point of view--from the point of view of the French, in a different way than Tunisia, and Vietnam, or Morocco, and other places of France, even though it's not part of metropolitan France. Bugeaud and his successors kill about 850,000 people during the campaign, very unequal battles. Bugeaud comes up with the idea of simply putting men, women, and children into these huge caves and caverns, and then simply throwing bombs in and so they all die. He did that over and over again. It's easy to say, "Well, the demons of the twentieth century, they come in the twentieth century, don't they?" But, as I suggested before in terms of the Commune, this stuff is out there in the nineteenth century as well, and so racist ideology is out there in the nineteenth century. There's no doubt about it. It wasn't that way in every place, but the French experience was pretty terrible. In the very well-documented case of what happened in what now is Congo and Zaire, which were sort of the private colony of the king of Belgium, the atrocities there are well-known. One could go on all day talking about these atrocities. The most well-known, certainly, and most well-documented, and, in a way because of what comes later in the twentieth century, is that of the conquest and indeed genocide. Here I'm borrowing an appropriate term, I think, in this case-that's not a term you throw around very loosely--of my friend and colleague, Ben Kiernan, whom some of you know, in his big book on genocide, which Yale Press published recently. They begin conquering Southwest Africa in 1885. So, Bismarck still has a few years

to go. In their way, as they would see it, among other people were the Herero, H-E-R-E-R-O, a Bantu group of about 75,000 cattle herders who were in the center of what would become the German colonial territory. Again, European powers are putting things like borders there, boundaries, and that has nothing to do with the way that, particularly nomadic people--they don't have any sense of borders. Mali, where I've been because my daughter was just studying in Touareg in northern Mali, north of Timbuktu. The Touareg are a people who had no sense of borders. There were Touareg across other borders, too. Borders are something that were artificially constructed by these powers to say, "Here. Our empire goes there and yours doesn't start until there." And, so, as these people rise up to defend their own territory, they are systematically massacred. They basically first decide to crush the uprising at all costs. There is in 1904 an extermination order. That's literally the German translation from the German. The proclamation of the local military commander is that, "The Herero people must leave this land. If they don't I will force them to do so by using the great gun," that is artillery. "Within the German border," that is defined as now German, "every male Herero armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death. I shall no longer receive women or children," that is spare them, "but will drive them back to their people or have them shot. These are my words to the Herero people." Now, I couldn't make this up. It's easy to say how terrible this is, but it is terrible. It was part of the enterprise and has remained part of the imperialist enterprise. It wasn't the goal of every imperialist to exterminate the people who were there, but if they got in the way in a very equal fighting. In India there were various cases of soldiers complaining it was too easy shooting down the rebels because it was just like hunting. It was a very British, upper-class analogy. It was just like hunting. Basically what they do if they don't shoot them they chase them out into the desert and then they cement over the wells in the oases so they die. Basically they exterminate about two-thirds of the people. There's a very excellent book on this written by a former graduate student here many moons ago called Isabel Hull that was published four or five years ago. The origins of this, and again there are people now writing and saying, "Well, it wasn't that bad. They brought trains to India, ended the huge disparities in prices." Certainly lots of good things did come. But looming in the background were these massacres. The edition that I'm working on now, that I'm just finishing of the book that you're kindly reading, there's a whole recent spate of interesting literature on the end of the British empire in Kenya in the 1950s. History of the Hanged is one. There's another one by a woman called Caroline Elkins at Harvard. The title

escapes me at the moment, but these are just fantastic, just gripping, just chilling accounts of essentially the mass murder, incarceration, and murder, and shooting, under the guise of "trying to escape" and all of this of hundreds of thousands of people. This was hidden from the British public, just systematically by the government. It's a long story and it's one that we have to wrestle with. Having said that, I want now to talk about the culture of imperialism--this is sort of shifting gears rather rapidly--and talk about Robert Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scouts. Again, because I was once asked to leave the Boy Scouts in Portland, Oregon because I was of no use and never accumulated a single badge, this is not the origins of this lecture. There's lots of stuff written on Baden-Powell. He's an easy person to mock. He's an easy person, I suppose, to have some sort of respect for, too, in a way, depending on your point of view. I'm not dissing the Boy Scouts. Once I had people running up. There was a woman who came up who was a Girl Scout. She says, "Oh, this is so cruel what you're saying about scouting. It's not like that." I know it's not like that now. But having had some relative who had the very strange idea of giving me, of all people, Boys' Life as a birthday present. I remember reading that and all this kind of over-the-top Americana publications, I suppose I'm reacting a little bit against that, too. But there is a point to all of this, so the rest of this is about Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts. Robert Baden-Powell was a soldier. He came up with the idea of scouting as a way of preparing British youth for imperialism and for the next war. The origins of the Scouts, in terms of its timing, that is the first decade of the twentieth century, has to be seen in terms of these international conflicts, these international great power rivalries with which we began. It comes at the time of the Moroccan Affair, the first Moroccan Affair and the second Moroccan Affair in 1905, 1911, when it seems like the French and the Germans will go to war against each other and they will bring in the other great powers. More about that. Robert Baden-Powell was a professional soldier. When he went back to England he thought that British youth were cigarette-smoking, heavy-drinking, flabby weaklings, whether they were upper classes and, even worse, his few lower classes, because they were underfed and therefore smaller. He hated the Oxbridge common rooms; he said, "With its town life, buses, hot and cold water laid on, everything is done for you." The British working classes, like the upper classes, tended to drink a lot. He was sure that there'd be a war fought in the lifetime of these same people, and he came to the idea of scouting. Now, America has a role in all of this. This country has always believed in the frontier. Those of you who had Glenda's course in American history and other people know about the Turner

Thesis, about always you can expand to the west. You can diffuse your social tensions in the east by giving people access to land further on and get rid of the Indians in the way, etc., etc. Now, we have friends in France who still read The Last of the Mohicans. There's just a fascination with the American frontier. This is extremely important in the end of the nineteenth century in Europe. Baden-Powell borrows the uniform of the Boy Scouts from the frontier uniform as he imagined it in America--the cowboy hat, the flannel shirt, their neckerchief, the short pants. He said, "The shape of a face gives a good guide to a man's character," this sort of firm face. He loved that. Square jaw, compared to working-class "loafers" and "shirkers," as he called them. It's this cult of masculinity. This comes at a time, one must say, when you've got very aggressive movement for female suffrage by the suffragettes who want the rights of women to vote in Britain, one of whom throws herself in front of a horse at a horse race, and sacrifices her life to make a point. It comes at a time as the famous Oscar Wilde trial. Oscar Wilde, of course, was gay. There was a sense that the virility of English manhood was being tested by women--BadenPowell did not like women, he referred to women as "silly women," "silly girls"--and by gays, whom he saw as effeminate and therefore not really British, and wouldn't be there. What good could they do in the next war? Also it's a time where in Germany particularly, but not only in Germany, men were dueling. There's sort of that test of masculinity. If you're lucky you'll end up with a dueling scar and not actually get killed. Most of them don't get killed. But they're dueling all over the place. They're dueling in the woods outside of Paris. They're dueling almost everywhere in Germany. They're dueling still in Britain. That sort of reaffirmation, according to Bob Nye and lots of other people, and all sorts of people have written on this. Ute Frevert, , my colleague, is now gone from Yale, unfortunately. This is part of the reaffirmation of virility. The tendency is to say, looking back, "Well, they're taking it out on animals, blowing the hell out of them and indigenous people, etc., etc." So, scouting for boys takes off. It spreads from Britain to Australia to Canada to New Zealand to India to Chile to Argentina to Brazil. In 1910 it starts in the United States. In 1910, Baden-Powell resigns from the command of a division of the Territorial Army to spend the rest of his life involved in scouting. Again, what I'm saying is that involves this sort of grafting on this idea of the American frontier. You're going to create your new frontier. Your new frontier is going to be in Africa. Your new frontier is going to be in Afghanistan. You create your frontiers, and then you hold the frontiers and you train these boys, these young men to hold the colonial frontier.

He finds sponsorship in the Daily Telegraph, which was a big conservative newspaper. All of the big newspapers are conservative. The 60,000 scouts--I think I sent this around--by 1909 there's 60,000 scouts in Britain. In 1910 there are 107,000. In 1913, 152,000, and in 1917, 194,000. Why was there such a short gap? Not that much of a leap between 1913 and 1917? Because they're dead. They get killed in the war. They're going off to fight. Scouting is finished rather early. You've got these big rallies, enormous in London, and scouts coming from all over the empire. Girl Scouts are created in 1914, but Baden-Powell didn't care much about that. Now, there had been groups of frontier-inspired youth organizations that existed in Scotland, particularly. They're called things like The Sons of Daniel Boone, The Woodcraft Indians, The Boys' Brigade in Glasgow in 1883. Some were church sponsored. Again, this is the sort of moralization of the working classes. You get them into groups. They won't smoke cigarettes, which is a good thing not to do. They won't drink. They won't hang out with the wrong people. They will go to work and become cogs in Britain's industrial empire. They, too, can look at maps of Africa being increasingly painted red, which was the color of the empire. So, nature remains a part of this. Again, to repeat, the cult of the American frontiersmen, let me say a little bit more about that, is part of this. The idea of the frontiersmen, the buckskin man. Rudyard Kipling is not my kind of poet, but anyway, he expresses often this idea. There's something hidden; go and find it--what's happened? I must have pushed something. I pushed something. It doesn't matter. I'm not easily alarmed--Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges, something behind the ranges is lost and waiting for you. Go! Baden-Powell described the frontiersman whose manhood is strong and rich, of a pure life. Now, his own predilection is that for him a life would not involve "silly women," as he put it. The other idea, and this is not at all, I'm not saying anything about his sexuality, but the reality of the situation is that he preferred the company of young men to anyone else. This is involved in the way he lived his life. The idea is that the free man must earn independence with his gun. This is, again, part of this old American western idea, but you apply it to indigenous people. Now, you have aggressive models coming from the American West. William "Wild Bill" Cody, from my wife's state of Nebraska, had killed thousands of buffalo. He had dueled. The duels that they do with the German dueling fraternities, you've got the equivalent in Dodge City, and all of this, where you're dueling, and the classic kind of Clint Eastwood western. He'd killed thousands of buffalo, dueled, and he's a killer and scalper of Indians. He was his own publicist and he had enormous influence in Britain. At the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, he kills Indian Chief Yellow Hand. In 1887 he crosses the Atlantic.

He goes to London, Paris, and Berlin. Queen Victoria came out of her extended period of decades of mourning for her dear husband, Albert, to attend the Wild Bill Cody Show. She wants to go. And she's there with all the others. She hadn't been to an event like that in twenty-six years. The irony is that Wild Bill Cody runs these fake combats between the Indians and the cowboys in the equivalent of stadiums in Britain. One of the ironies of this about art and reality merging is that some of the people he brought across the Atlantic were Indians who'd actually fought in a battle against him in the Dakotas, and he hires them as extras and he takes them to Paris, to London, and to Berlin. They are a big, huge success. It's the Wild West program. At the same time in Canada, those of you who are Canadian know about the Mounted Police and all that business. The Mounted Police become a powerful, though somewhat tamer, more acceptable, more vanilla equivalent of that, of keeping order in Saskatoon and all of these places like that. I've actually been to Saskatoon. It's a pretty nice place. The idea of these mountain men--now the mountain men get uniforms. The mountain men are no longer sort of taking pot shots at people in Kentucky on the frontier or scalping Indians in the Dakotas. They're wearing sort of freelance scalpers. They're wearing the uniform of these countries and they're big-time imperialists. That's really the point. Here's a verse, I can't remember where I got that. Our mission the a is lawless proud to plant savages and the and right protect trust to of the hold British pioneer. these freedom (It vast here. rhymes.) domains,

Restrain And 'tis

daring

But with 300 mountain man You've got to kind of make it rhyme a little bit--mountain man, pronounce it as if you were a mountain man. But anyway, and that's a little harder to do if you have an Oxbridge accent, which I clearly don't. Also, this is part of the whole--I don't have time to do it now. I spent a fair amount of time in Australia, but it's also part of the idea of being Australian, too. Anyway, that's another thing. Kipling's Lost Legionis really just awful, but here we go: There That But Is [I'm Our They But is carries split breaking supposed to be in the more they us shaking and the a legion no a road respectful left groomed clubs when us us and I that colors thousand to do this, their and the the but was never or listed crest detachments rest anyway] blessing crammed messes

fathers, taught we're

To

go

and

find

out

and

be

damned,

dear

boys

To go and shot and be damned, dear boys. [Virility, adventure, loyalty--loyalty to boys, loyalty to young men, and brotherhood, and so it starts like that. Can I barely go on?] Out Under From At And Will Britishers the the each at stand all to south from the the and sound his post as stand the of where a or north, the the woods of the austral they'll come mother's danger sentry to is Great Northwest sky forth cry most then fall

The Empire's frontiersmen. Now, Baden-Powell is his own best publicist, even better than Wild Bill Cody had been. He helps plant newspaper articles about him. Here's one from 1900. "It has been suggested that Major-General Baden-Powell's unrivaled skill as a cavalry scout forms a quite remarkable inheritance of heredity that he's descended from Pocahontas, the American Indian princess," which he was clearly not. But how does he become so popular? How do these God-awful poems that I've just read, how do they become popular? They become popular because they become the stuff of boys literature of the culture of imperialism. They were the British equivalents of Boys' Life. I'm not knocking Boys' Life. I don't know if that existed. I strongly preferred Sports Illustrated and the sporting news to that. They become the stuff that people are reading as they're looking at these maps of Africa gradually becoming painted British. Now, how did he become well known? Well, because he's an imperialist. He's fighting. In 1896 he fought in the Matabele War, which I sent around, not the war but the name, a skirmish against about 1,000 indigenous fighters. It's at that point where he starts coming up with his own freelance uniform that would become that of the Boy Scouts. In military units people that were scouts, again the idea of tracking. You're tracking, you're seeing where the Indians have been. The Indians can see where you've been now. You learn how they do it. How the blades of grass turn and all of that. I couldn't scout anything. You see how they do it. They become known as scouts, which is sort of an Americanization of a term. This is what he likes to do. Teddy Roosevelt, there's a good example of that. Talk about that kind of narcissism of the colonial imagination and the imperial imagination, "Rough, rough, we're the stuff. We want to fight and we can't get enough." Whoopie! That's the song of the Rough

Riders from the Cuban-American War of Teddy Roosevelt, so it's part of the hysteria of the U.S. Spanish War. But again, it's the frontier spirit. Baden-Powell helps create his own myth, which I've said. He drew pictures of the people that he had allegedly shot. These pictures end up being in the tabloid newspapers. Again, the role of the tabloids in spreading all this stuff is terribly important. I said before there's twenty-one daily newspapers in Paris at the time. I don't remember how many there are in Britain, but there are an awful lot of them. He sketched a last stand of eight people, supposedly until they get rescued, against the indigenous people. He claimed that the Zulus, against whom the British War, the Zulus called him, this sounds unlikely, "the man, he who likes to lie down to shoot." The Ashanti called him, in awe, this was his term for himself, "he of the big hat." And that in this war in 1896, they called him "the wolf," in awe again, his opponents. "The beast that does not sleep but sneaks around at night." So, he became "the wolf who never sleeps." There's a slight problem with this invention of a term to describe himself as "the wolf who sneaks around," is there aren't any wolves in Africa. There are not any wolves at all. He made it up and made it up rather badly, having taken it out of some book somewhere else. But that doesn't stop the tabloids from referring to him as "the wolf who never sleeps." The Boers understand that in the Boer War, that is the Dutch Afrikaner opposition opponents, who by the way--the British created the term "concentration camp." Again, I'm not looking back from history. They're separating children and women from the men, and trying to avoid that they receive provisioning out in the bush. They create the term "concentration camp" in the Boer War. The Boers actually lived there and had for a long time, though they're not an indigenous people. They know there aren't any wolves there. So, they start mocking BadenPowell. But "he of the big hat" did not slow down at all. So, in 1899, he has the good luck to be at the siege of Mafeking, where they are surrounded by a force, but not a terribly aggressive force. Again, he draws pictures of people on duty and all of that, night duty. And the town had resisted 217 days stationed on the railway line that runs between the Cape and Rhodesia. This was a big takeoff for his reputation. Just the name Baden-Powell, the initials B.P. become identified with British imperialism. B.P, "He loves the night and after his return from the hollows of the veldt, where he has kept so many anxious vigils, he lies awake hour after hour upon his camp mattress in the veranda tracing out in his mind the various means and agencies by which he can forestall the Boer move, which unknown to them he has personally already watched. He is the wolf who never sleeps." Now, B.P., those initials also become British Pluck, the idea that the British are mudders. This is kind of the image that would come out of the very heroic Battle of Britain under the bombs

of German Luftwaffe in World War II. British Pluck, also B.P., British Peerage, British Peers, the upper classes, the title British Peers. He becomes identified with all of this, the wolf who never sleeps. His advice to his own garrison is to "sit tight and shoot straight. All is well here," he writes. They were able to get messages out to the newspapers who are covering this. Now, again, the British newspapers covered another siege which ends rather badly, which is at Khartoum, with the death of Charles Chinese Gordon. He was called Chinese Gordon because he slaughtered the Chinese, and he gets his at Khartoum. Of course, school children, there's an enormous, enormous outpouring of tears over the death of this man. The newspapers, because of these modern techniques, they can follow all of this stuff pretty much how the siege is going, etc., etc. So, B.P. the prince of good fellows, prince of scouts, here we go. They emphasize his youth. He's forty-three but he's youthful. He's cheerful. He's always whistling and telling stories, even when things are going bad. He loves pranks, childish pranks. This is from some of the newspapers. "Life was a game, but you have to play it honorably." It was a game that silly women, as he called them, could not play. He becomes known again as sports, mass sports is starting just at this time. The Olympics are starting just at this time. Again, there's a reassertion of virility in these Olympics. He's called "the gallant goalkeeper," "the goaltender of Mafeking." So, a sports analogy becomes part again of this imperial thrust. They print patriotic letters to him, which can be signed and can be sent. You can send a postcard. You could send a postcard home. Your parents have left after parents' weekend, if they came. You can send them the following postcard: Dear Dear Mom and Dad, We have shouted "Rule Britannia!" We have sung God Save the Queen. We have toasted gallant Baden a half a score. We have sent our best respects to Plucky Mafeking and we have hoisted flags and bunting in galore. With a wild and frenzied madness born of joy the empire cheers, while we Britishers rejoice through the land. In this hour of jubilation I am sending you a line with the wish that I could warmly shake your hand. Yours exultantly. Then you sign your own name to it. So, scouting, as someone said, I can't remember whom, was an attempt to make these "values" of Mafeking permanent and to trace them on the map of these countries of these peoples all over the world. A 1909 newspaper said: It may be that he is not a great soldier of the sort which Napoleon, or the Maltese, or the Kitcheners are made. He is the frontiersman, the born leader of irregulars, a maverick, and the Parents,

empire has need of such. Furthermore, he has the knack of seizing the imagination of boys and a deep sympathy with them. He is doing his day's work for the empire by training a number of manly little fellows to keep their wits about them and their eyes skinned. We shall profit another day in a much greater affair than Mafeking. That, of course, is preparing for the war against those other peoples who might contest British domination, not the indigenous peoples, but the other powers in Africa. So, be prepared, B.P., the same thing, the same initials. Anybody here a scout? I had to memorize that stuff. I didn't get a single badge, but a scout. Be prepared. You're supposed to do that. The jamborees. He creates these jamborees. Also, at the same time, and I don't have time to talk about this, but this is the same time when Arthur Conan Doyle, the idea of sleuthing, but it was sort of an urban sleuthing for evildoers in London. It kind of merges with all of that. Of boys who risked their life, he says, "I said to one of these boys on one occasion when he came through a rather heavy fire, 'You will get hit one of these days riding about like that when shells are flying.' And he replied, 'Sir, I pedal so quickly, they'll never catch me.' Those boys don't seem to mind the bullets one bit." Of course, millions of them would catch bullets that ultimately they minded. "I will do my best to God and the king. I will do my best to help others. Whatever it costs me. I know the scout law and I will obey it." Again, I am not knocking doing good things for people. Please do understand. But I'm just trying to place the origins of whatever you think of the Boy Scouts in the context of the culture of imperialism, because that's where it belongs and that's where it started. In 1912 in August a boat capsized off the coast of Devon, I think. Nine boys from eleven to fourteen drown. They were scouts. There was an enormous, enormous national funeral service in London in which millions of people saw at least parts of it. This helped. Their deaths, and many more deaths would follow, helped tie together the idea of scouting with service to the nation. A magazine called The Captain--again, this is part of the culture of imperialism and of aggressive nationalism--had a troop of mobile scouts on bikes fitted with a rifle bucket and a clip to carry a carbine, a rifle. So, it shifts. The image of all of this shifts from Africa, where much of the fighting was already over, and indigenous people destroyed or pacified, to the European enemies against whom the next war would be fought. There's a famous cartoon in the British magazine Punch which showed a Boy Scout complete in uniform being prepared, taking Mrs. Britannia, that is the image of Victoria who was dead, but the female image of the empire, by the arm. It says, "Fear not, grandma. No danger can befall you. I, after all, remember I am with you now." Boy Scouts played an enormous role in 1914 and in the subsequent years.

"Goodbye, I'm off to war." There was a caricature in the newspaper as Boy Scouts joined up along with lots of other people who weren't scouts in the war. As you well know, they don't come back, or a lot of them don't come back. It's part of the mood of nationalism and of imperialism, of the New Imperialism. Those two things are tied together and the expectation, indeed in many cases, as in the case of BadenPowell, joyous expectation. You could test your virility in a more meaningful combat than simply slaughtering indigenous people, or picking off Boers with greater numerical superiority. By the way, Robert Baden-Powell died in Kenya, in 1941, from which he had just sent his last patriotic message to the Boy Scouts, in what was a very different war. Thank you. I'll see you on Wednesday. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 16 Transcript October 29, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: The second announcement is the movies, the films. I've done what I think is the way to do it. They will be available. I think the first one is available now. You can watch it in the privacy of your rooms in whatever college you are. You are to please see them. Paths of Glory goes with next week. That's the first one. It's very short and it's very good. It's one of the first Kubrick films. It's about the mutinies. I will talk about the mutinies next week. Please have seen the film by Monday. Can you tell them in section how they do that? I did it, but I'm not sure how I did it. They should be set up. Another thing you can do is you can go down to Film Studies in the Whitney Humanities Center, and you can check out the film and watch it there, or I think you can take it back, also. But you can watch it on your computer screens. Those are the three. The first one is the first one and then the second one is the second one. Boy, I'm really awake today. The second one is Triumph of the Will, which will go with the fascism lecture. Be sure to have seen it before. The last one is Au revoir les enfants, a Louis Malle film which will be subtitled in English, I think. Yes, it is. That goes with the second to the last lecture. Make sure you've seen these films. None of them are long and they're all great, great, great films, if you can buy into Kirk Douglas as a French soldier. You have to suspend reality a little bit to do that. Any announcements? Things happening? All right. Today, much of this lecture just parallels the chapter. The origins of World War I can be confusing and I just want to make those perfectly clear so that you know this stuff. So, I hope you read the chapter. Also, we used to have you read Goodbye to All That, which is very long,

but very good, by Robert Graves. Then we used the inevitable All Quiet on the Western Front, but we suppressed those. So, it's even more important that you read the chapter. Let me get into that. I'm not going to write all the terms on the board, because there's so many. I sent them around, and it's hard to see anyway. What I have up here is when I talk about birthrights is--between the drilling in the background, gosh darnit--anyway, live births in 1908 were thirteen per 1,000. I'll go into that in a minute. Let me start now. Because World War I--in 1914 so many people wanted war, and they ran to the Gare de l'Est and chanted, " Berlin, Berlin," lots of champagne, and then in Hauptbahnhof in Berlin, they chanted, "nacht Paris, nacht Paris." Nobody knew that the war was going to last over four years, and kill millions of people, and mark the end of four empires, and, arguably, help contribute to the end of the fifth, that is the British Empire and the impetus toward decolonization that comes out of World War I. Nobody knew that the war that was supposed to be over by December wasn't going to be over by December. Outside of a couple of journalists, who had been following the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria and had seen kind of the evolution of trenches, nobody predicted that kind of war. I'll talk about military strategy at the end today, or--in the plans for the war--or, depending on time, the timing, at the beginning of next hour. So, this makes the origins of the war so much more important. There's certainly, in terms of diplomatic history, there's no other event in the history of the world that has been so pored over than the diplomatic origins of World War I, the famous entangling alliances, the house of cards that collapses, all of those very familiar images. After the war, I had this great uncle who fought in the war, a great, great uncle. He was an old dude when I was a very little guy. He had been in France in 1917. At the end of the war, I remember when I was a little kid he gave me this sort of printed out book showing that the Germans had started the war. It was the official account of the origins of World War I. Of course, the fact that at the end of the war, the war ends with German troops inside France. This has a huge, huge impact on what happens because of two things, looking ahead. One, it became very easy for the German right to say, "We weren't defeated. We were stabbed in the back." By whom? By the Jews. By the Communists. By the Socialists. Secondly, because Germany was defeated they had to sign on the bottom line saying, "We started the war alone, we alone." The famous war guilt clause, war guilt clause. Now, the Germans didn't start the war alone. I'll leave it to you to decide whether their responsibility, the famous blank check given to Austria-Hungary, is more important than the roles of other states, Russia declaring

mobilization which was tantamount to an act of war for reasons we'll come to, or France, for that matter. But that's why the origins of World War I are so important. The other reason is that clearly World War I unleashes the demons of the twentieth century. The kind of racist stuff, the even somewhat genocidal stuff was out there in the public domain, but World War I turns it loose. We talk about, I hope convincingly, the Europe of extremes, which is the title of a wonderful book by Eric Hobsbawm, and one extreme being communism. But the other extreme, which was more prenant, more victorious, more overwhelming in Europe was the rise of fascism and particularly the rise of National Socialism. This stuff was out there, but National Socialism and the Nazis cannot be understood without World War I. That's why this stuff on the origins, this diplomatic history is so important. That's why I'm paralleling what you are reading. If you asked people in the 1880s and 1890s, "Who will fight in the next war?" most people in Germany and many people in France would say that "it'll be the Germans fighting the French, because of Alsace-Lorraine." Other people, as we'll see, particularly in the 1890s, will say, "No. It's the British and the French who are going to be fighting, colonial rivalries, Fashoda and all that business." But the one in what you're reading, as I put it, the old hatred that cannot be put offstage during the entire period, even when French and British relations are at their nadir, at their worst, is that between Germany united, the empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Chateau de Versailles, and France, because, after all, the French had to give the second-most industrialized region, one of the most prosperous regions that is Alsace and much of Lorraine, to Germany. I'm going to end up with an incident that looked like war was possibly going to break out between Germany and France, that is the Saverne incident, and talk a little bit about AlsaceLorraine and stuff that isn't in the book later, just to make it clear. It is complicated, because the French could never accept the fact that Alsace and much of Lorraine was now German. This is, again, remember we talked about nationalism and constructed identity? Most people in Alsace and in those parts of Lorraine that became part of the Second Reich, the Second Empire, what do they speak? They spoke German dialect. They did not speak French. More about that later. There was bilingualism, but that's interesting. If you asked them, "What nationality are you?" and they reply in German, "I am French." If you were somebody doing a survey now, you'd be sort of shocked by that. But these are complex, these identities. Anyway, the rivalry between France and Germany was already always there. If you went to the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the Statue of Strasbourg, the town of Strasbourg, which is an important European capital now of the new Europe, for better or for worse, was covered in

mourning cloth for much of the period because it had been "amputated." They used this image often. The right arm of France had been amputated in the settlement after the Franco-German War. So, that rivalry is there. French military planners, right through the whole period at the time of Boulanger, who was one who built his reputation--you already read about the general Georges Boulanger--he is Mr. Revenge. Military planners said, "When the war comes, we will move into Alsace and take Alsace and parts of Lorraine back. Then we will move to Berlin. Simple, just like that." To the very end, that's their military strategy, attack. They're going to attack and get back Alsace-Lorraine. What the Germans plan to do has a lot to do with the way the war starts, and we will get there. The second big rivalry in Europe--and again think of the 28th of June 1914, Sarajevo, a sixteen-year-old heavily-armed Gavrilo Princip--is that between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Their rivalry is over the South Slavs who are within the Austria-Hungarian Empire and the Serbs, who are not, but who provide a constant force for destabilization in the region. As you know, since the time of Catherine the Great, she set her eyes on Istanbul, Constantinople-they're the same city--on the straits, on access to the Black Sea, that there was always going to be this drive of Russia to the straits. As you know, later Turkey allies with Germany. But the big rivalry is in terms of Russian influence, destabilizing influence, seeing itself as the protector, the mother of all of the Slav peoples, is a permanent force of destabilization in the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Ironically, the guy who gets offed along with his wife, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, he was one of the more--he was a prejudiced figure in many ways, but he was considered a moderate, because he believed that the South Slavs should have kind of a third status, possibly, along with Austria and Hungary within sort of a tripartite empire. Of course, he gets gunned down and what comes next is the blank check, where the Germans say, "Do what you want to settle this situation." And the famous ultimatum to Serbia by Austria-Hungary. The Russian government stirs up pan-Slavic fervor in the Balkans. They work consistently to do that. There are religious ties, the Orthodox religion. There are ties of alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet used in Serbia. Serbo-Croatian is the same spoken language, although Serb friends and Croatian friends would deny that in some ways, but basically it's the same spoken language. But the Serbs use Cyrillic alphabet, which is what the Russians use, and the Croats, who are Catholic, use the alphabet used in Western Europe. So, the European alliance system, these entangling alliances, hinges on French and German enmity and the competing interests of Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. It also hinges on Bismarck, who was in many

ways an odious guy but a very clever guy. His fear was that Germany would have to fight a war on two fronts. So, what these powers are doing are looking for allies. As Bismarck said, it's interesting he said it in French, showing that in many ways French was still the language of diplomacy. He said when you've got these great powers, five of them, "you have to be trois." You have to be with the three and not the two. His worst nightmare--and Bismarck was somebody who said he liked to lie awake at night and hate--his worst fear was having to fight the Russians and having to fight the French at the same time. When he encourages the French to get into the imperial game at the beginning, he's doing that to try to get them to blow off a little steam out there in Africa. "My map of Africa is here," remember the line of the map of Europe. So, as he said, here's the exact quote, "All international politics reduces itself to this formula: try to be trois." As long as the world is governed by the unstable equilibrium of five great powers--Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, and France. These treaties, the arrangements--that is, the emergence of the triple alliance and the emergence of the triple entente at the time of the war, Italy is up for grabs, open to the highest bidder. Italy will go to war, despite having been a member originally of the alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany. It will go to war on the allied side, because the allies promise them more in 1915. But that's another story. But that's very important in the emergence of fascism in Italy, because Italy after the war, though nominally victorious, does not get what it wants. It does not get the Dalmatian Coast. It does not get the Tyrol mountains. If you fought a war based on national claims, why turn around and give regions that have only a minority of Italian populations to Italy? Benito Mussolini goes from being a socialist to being a fascist, helps create that party based upon this idea that Italy had been screwed. They never got what they were supposed to in World War I. So, he comes power as a fascist, as you know, in 1922. In 1879 Bismarck forges this cornerstone alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it's predicated on German support for Habsburg opposition to the expansion of Russian interests in the Balkans. You can see in this the origins of the famous blank check in the hot summer, as it was, in 1914. In 1880 Italy allies with Germany and Austria-Hungary forming the triple alliance. But the wording is such that it doesn't necessarily bring Italy into the war. As I said, Italy will come in on the side of Austria-Hungary and Germany and Italy comes in, as I just said, in 1915. Now, the details of these treaties, and these diplomats are still under the influence of Metternich and all that, but the details are not known, but the outlines are known. The details are not known but the outlines of these treaties are basically known.

One seam right through the period is every time that Russia seeks to expand its influence in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary gets concerned and they turn to Germany saying, "You will back us. You will back us, won't you?" They say, "Yes, of course, we will back you." In the end what happens is that the blank check goes, after the ultimatum, to Serbia by AustriaHungary. "Do whatever you want to settle this situation. We will back you all the way." Why does Germany become encircled diplomatically and ultimately in war? How does it happen that Russia, czarist autocratic Russia allies with republican France? That the czar, the oppressor of the non-Russian peoples, especially the Jews in Russia, comes to Paris in 1889 and they name a beautiful bridge after him, the Pont Alexandre III, the bridge of Alexander III. The marine band learns the theme song of the czars and the socialists go wild in France. How can you ally with these people who are repressing socialists, who are repressing nationalities, they're repressing everybody, and run this police state? So, the last thing that Bismarck wanted are these two big states to come together on either side of him. How does this happen? Both France and Russia are outside of the triple alliance, which you already know. But there's another reason. As a matter of fact, I read about four or five years ago there are still French companies trying to get their money back from Russia because they lost their money in 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power and ultimately nationalized industries, big industries particularly. It is economic in that one of the old things the people say about the French economy, but it's still true, is that French money investments, much of it goes outside of France. They build the railroads in Spain, but they invest heavily in Russian industry and in Russian railroads. So, these economic ties are very important. There are also cultural ties. Because of the popularity of the French in aristocratic circles within Russia, but on the other hand, there were lots of Russian nobles who spoke German, who lived in Konigsberg, which is still this sort of enclave now that is still part of Russia, sort of stuck between Poland and Lithuania. But the most important reason is that French investment in Russia increases dramatically in the 1880s and 1890s. And that France seeks an ally against Germany and that relations between Russia and Germany, and this is already obvious, you've already discerned this, are going to deteriorate because of this tender relationship between Austria-Hungary and Germany over the Balkans. In the very end, one of the ludicrous aspects of this whole damn thing is that just as they're about to go to war, and just as Czar Nicholas II, about whom we'll come back and discuss one day, he signs the mobilization order. And mobilization, for reasons I'll come back to, is tantamount to an act of war. He's dashing off letters to his dearest cousin Willie. And Willie is

writing back to "My Dear Cousin Nicky." These people are related. They're cousins. But international circumstances, and the tensions over the Balkans, and French fears of Germany, bring Russia and France together and the French marine band plays whatever the theme song of the Russia czars is--it certainly wasn't Doctor Zhivago--when they arrived. For the Russian government that blames Austria-Hungary for trying to undercut what they view as their logical influence in the Balkans, and Germany will back them right away. In 1892 France and Russia sign a military treaty that says that there'll be a military response if the other were attacked by Germany or by one or more of its allies. They form a formal alliance in 1894. What about Britain? What about Britain? One of the things is that the British don't want to ally with anybody. They're on bad terms with the French and they're on bad terms with the Russians, to make a long story short. The Great Game, as they called it, rivalry over Afghanistan, over the entire sort of extension of that frontier into Asia, means that the chances of Great Britain joining in alliance with Russia and with France seems extremely dim. Britain wants to control the seas and to go it alone. But they discover a fact that shouldn't have surprised them in the Boer War in South Africa. They don't have any friends. Nobody supports what they're doing in South Africa. It's better to have an ally in a world that gets increasingly dangerous. What happens gradually is that the rivalry, again to make a long story short, between Germany and Britain ultimately will cause Britain to look for allies, and that suddenly it seems less probable that France and Britain will go to war. What is the nature of this increasingly bitter rivalry between Germany and Britain? One is obvious--Africa. That's one. Second, economic in that the German economy is growing by leaps and bounds. It is the number one country in chemistry. Those of you that are chemists, the whole university system--in Britain the university system isn't terribly practical, but in Germany chemistry is part of what they do in the German universities, which are great universities. They began to lap the British in chemistry, chemical productions, and they catch up and go ahead, and steel, too. This is a big rivalry. The British government begins to run scared because the City is running scared. Third is this famous naval rivalry, about which Paul Kennedy, my colleague and friend has written a book, The Anglo-German Naval Rivalry. The Germans start turning out these huge ships. Then the British respond. They produce the Dreadnaught, which becomes a symbol for these huge powerful battleships like nothing that had ever been seen before. The naval leagues in both countries--again, this is a culture of imperialism, the culture of aggressive nationalism-put huge pressure on governments to throw every available resource in the building of more

and more ships. Britain, which had always basically controlled the seas since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the late sixteenth century. They're running scared. Now, again, you can't look ahead and say, "Aha! But there was only one naval battle of any consequence in World War I at the Battle of Jutland off the coast of Denmark." It's kind of a draw, but basically the Germans are forced back in their port so they lose. But the British couldn't anticipate that. So, their fear of Germany and the saber rattling of the thoroughly irresponsible idiot, Wilhelm II, helps make it possible to imagine an alliance with "the sneaky French." In the 1890s there were a lot of war novels about future wars. This, in itself, reflects the fact that many people thought there would be another war. Again, they didn't know it was going to be a war of four and a half years, but they think there's going to be another war. I assure you I've never read the following book. But one of the more successful was, for a brief time, was this sort of book about a future war. I guess it's in the early 1890s, or about the time of Fashoda. It's in the 1890s, or maybe the first couple of years of the twentieth century. It doesn't matter. Dover, the middle class of Dover are out parading around in the rain on a Sunday morning, miserable weather. They suddenly find that Dover's been taken over by the sneaky French, that they've been digging a tunnel under the English Channel. Napoleon wanted to dig a tunnel under the Channel. There is a tunnel under the English Channel, the Chunnel. The trains rocket along, at least until they get to Britain and then they sort of plod along at about two kilometers an hour, but they've improved that side of it. Anyway, there's sort of a French bias, but too bad. They suddenly find, as they're strolling along in the pouring rain, the horizontal rain, that the sneaky French, there were soldiers all over. Taking these sort of national stereotypes, the French are disguised as waiters wearing dirty waiter uniforms. This is the British image. I wouldn't even comment on what English kitchens would have been like. That would be a cheap shot. But under these towels were sneaky weapons. They take over Dover. Then, of course, the British get it together and they drive them back into the tunnel, and shoot a few, and then they cement up the tunnel, and then parliament passes more battleship bills, etc., etc., the future novel. But there's another one four or five years later. I haven't read this one, either, and I'm not going to read it. The people in Whitby or Scarborough, speaking of horizontal rain in the east coast, they wake up and they see these huge German battleships just lobbing shells that can reach and blow up York, lobbing one shell after another. The sequel isn't very interesting, but the British parliament passes even more bills. Then the battleships of the "good guys" go and blow up the battleships of the bad guys, and everybody can go back to eating odd things on a Sunday morning.

So, how does it happen that that scenario is reversed, of what the future will be? I've just explained it. It has to do with the fears of both of these states of Germany. And that the crises, which you can read about, the Moroccan crisis in 1905 makes even firmer this military alliance. It's called an entente, that word is in English, too, or an understanding, but basically it's an alliance. By 1905 they're already saying, "Look, our navy, the British Navy will take care of the North Sea and the Channel, and you guys take care of the Mediterranean." The crisis in 1911, the second Moroccan crisis, which pushes Germany and France close to war, affirms all of the above things that I've said. Don't get the idea that in 1911 things are more dangerous than 1910, and in 1910 they're more dangerous than in 1909. Again, this sort of hydraulic model of pressure building up and finally there is war. It doesn't work like that. These alliances become firmed up. Of these great powers that Britain, and France, and Russia end up in--Bismarck was dead by then, but in his worst nightmare of being trois, of being three. The French, by the way, had another reason to be particularly eager to have an alliance. An odd thing happens in la belle France, in most of France. The French population stops growing. It just stops as of 1846-1847. It's regionally specific. In Brittany and in the Auvergne, in the center of France, people are still churning out babies. You still have huge families. We have friends, one of them just died, older people, and they grew up in misery in the mountains. Misery. They had thirteen children and twelve children. They were one of twelve or thirteen children. But in most of France that's not the case. In one part of southwestern France, when people had a second baby they received a condolence card. Isn't that bizarre? The French population stops growing. Why? There are a couple of reasons. This is just an aside, but it's interesting. The Napoleonic Code, remember, ends primogeniture, so you've got to divide up the plot of land into two or three or into two. Birth control. There are two arguments: the peasants start it and then it filters up to the middle classes, or the middle class starts it and it filters down. It depends on where you are in France. But they stop having children. Look at this. I wrote it on the board, and it may be in the book, I don't even remember. Here are live births, 1908-1913 per thousand: Italy 32.4, Austria 31.9, Germany 29.3, England 24.9, USA 24.3, France 19.5. That is so low. The French population would have literally not grown had it not been for immigrants. Immigrants then were people coming from Italy and from Switzerland, but mostly from Italy, and from Spain, some, and from Belgium. What's the effect of this? There's this enormous crisis. It has to do also with this sort of threatened virility. Why do we have fewer children? What's the matter with us? France has

become too effeminate, etc., etc. You could just hear the language of this. Women are not serving the state. Why are they not having babies anymore? What's the matter? They want to vote. Is this getting in the way of having babies that can be sent off to war? It causes an enormous problem. It's discussed all over the place, particularly by the nationalists. "We don't have enough children." Jumping ahead, and I'll come back to this, Verdun, 1916. The Germans say, "We're not going to take the forts at Verdun. They're impenetrable, untakeable, cannot be taken, cannot be pris. But we will make them pay so many hundreds of thousands of people, that we will bleed them and they will be forced to sue for peace." Falkenhayn was the general. "We won't take the forts Douaumont and Vaux, but we will kill so many hundreds of thousands of people, and we can afford to lose hundreds of thousands of people, because our birth rate is higher." Nice for the people sent into all this stuff. More about that later. So, this has a big effect. If you're going to go to war and get Alsace-Lorraine back, and if Germany gets more and more aggressive, irresponsible, no question about it. In an age of aggressive nationalism, you'd better have somebody else to help you out. There's a lot of them, and they blew us away in 1870-1871, and they defeated--they didn't blow away, but they defeated Austria. Prussia defeated Austria in 1866, cementing its role as the most important power in Europe. So, that helps as well. The French fears and all that. A couple more points. I don't want to give you an example from this and I mention it just briefly. It's interesting about how this works, how small incidents in a complicated world of national rivalries and competing identities can almost launch a war. Bam! It took the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to start it all off. There would have been a war sometime. This is the case of Zabern, in German, Saverne in French It's a very nice little town. I went to Saverne. You've got to see all these places. So I went to Saverne. There's a nice canal that runs through it. Alsace and Strasbourg were annexed to France in 1681 by the megalomaniac Louis XIV. They had been part of France a very long time. In 1871, for reasons you know, they become part of Germany. But this incident at Saverne, what it does is it reinforces the stereotypes that the French have of the Germans and that the Germans have of the French. It's the image of German quest for domination, and aggressiveness and the role of the German army, which seems to have absolutely no limits. Someone once said about Prussia that it was a state tacked on to an army. The Saverne Affair seemed to indicate that Germany was still the same way. If you go up to Alsace, you go up to the Vosges Mountains. There's this route called the Route des Crtes, or the route of the peaks. You can look down into the Vosges--it still is

France, but from what had been German Alsace. You can see all of these monuments put up by German hiking clubs to try to reaffirm this German identity that people had. Identity is an extremely complex thing. First of all, what is clear is that the vast majority of the population spoke German. Whether this makes them feel German or not, it's not sure. Let me give you a couple examples. I didn't send this around; it's too much. Let's say for the total of Alsace and Lorraine, the parts that were annexed into the German Reich, that the number of communes in which German dialect was the dominant language is 1,225; in which French was the dominant language was 385. The percentage of the population that spoke German is seventy-seven percent. The population that spoke French as their major language was twelve percent. There was some bilingualism, but not a whole lot, actually, and ten percent sort of neither, in that they were probably more or less perfectly bilingual because of intermarriage. So, when the Germans come in after 1871, they are better than what the French did after World War I. The French try to just rip German out as a language of instruction. Get rid of all the street signs in German. The Germans are a little more delicate in the way that they do things, but German is the language of administration. Another important point is that they don't trust the Alsatians. Even though they speak German, they don't trust them. Alsace and those parts of Lorraine are annexed into the Reich, but they don't have the same rights as a region that the other parts of Germany like Wurttemberg and Bavaria have. German deputies from Alsace and those parts of Lorraine don't have the right to vote on issues of war, for example, in the Reichstag. They are not trusted because they are seen as potentially disloyal to the Reich. The idea is that they have been infected with Frenchness. Part of this is religious. It's so complex. Alsace is a wonderfully interesting area. It has the largest percentage of Protestants in France outside of Ardche in the south center. It's also got a large percentage of Jews, who had been victimized by anti-Semitic riots after 1848. But the majority of the population is Catholic. The German Empire, going back to the Kulturkampf of Bismarck, the war against the Catholics, still doesn't really trust the Catholics. You've got Catholics in Bavaria, usually very right-wing Catholics in Bavaria. You've got Catholics in the Rhineland. You've got some Catholics up in the North in the Palatinate and you've got a lot of Catholics in Alsace. So, they don't trust them, basically. They don't trust them. Relations between the German troops, who, as in the case of Spain, are not coming from that region--people occupying Catalonia come from Galicia or they come from Castile so they won't be infected by the local

population, from the point of view of the Spanish state--so, the troops that are in Alsace are not from Alsace, because they don't trust them. So, tensions are very good. What happens in Saverne at a place where military civil relations aren't terribly good, in this town of 8,000 people, is that there is an incident that gets blown out of proportion. There is some drilling. The Germans soldiers are always drilling. And they're drilling and the commander makes a crack about the Alsatians. He calls them an extremely unfortunately scatological term that he meant to refer to all Alsatians. He essentially says, "Well, if you beat the hell out of those people, you'll be doing a service to all." This gets around. One of the reasons that relations weren't very good in this particular town was because there was a German officer who had the bad idea of sleeping with a fourteen-year-old girl. Some of the local guys go get this guy in this room and just pound him into a well-deserved pulp. So, it spins out of control. What happens is on both sides in Berlin and Paris, this becomes a huge incident, confirming the stereotype of the Other. There's nasty language. Bethmann-Hollweg, who was the chancellor then, says some over-the-top things about the French, and the influence of France and Alsace, etc., etc., and that the French are planning a war. And the French government, in a time when there is a nationalist revival, at least among the elites in France, they respond in kind and everything gets big titles, big titres, big headlines and stuff like that. They don't go to war. But what it does is it reaffirms these stereotypes and it makes people a little more edgy. In 1913, but well before that, military planners--I have three minutes and that's just what I need--military planners are looking ahead to the next war. The French we've already talked about. They have a not terribly poetically designated plan number eighteen, which is to invade Alsace-Lorraine with lan. That's all you need, they said, lan, patriotic frenzy, fury. All you need is to be on the offensive and that's the end of it. By the way, they invade wearing red pants and they could be shot, picked out through the fog finally in 1914, until they put a little less-bright color on. How are the Germans going to fight a war on two fronts? How are you going to do that? They're afraid of the Russians. Why? There are a lot of Russians and the other peoples. They think it's going to take about two weeks for the Russian army, once mobilization is declared, that the big bear will roll their forces toward the German frontier in German Poland. So, how are you going to win the war in two weeks? If you invade France not through Alsace-Lorraine, but if you invade--well, you're going to have big trouble. You're going to run into fortification. So, how are you going to invade France? The only way you can defeat them, and a guy called Schlieffen, whose name I wrote in what I sent around

to you, is that you have to invade Belgium, and, from his point of view, the Netherlands, though Moltke, his successor, takes the Netherlands out of the equation. Belgium had been declared independent and neutral in 1831. If you go into Belgium the idea is you invade Belgium. You get through the big fort at Lige. You get through the kind of rough country, which is not too much. Then you hit the plat pays, the flatlands, and you roll toward the English Channel. The last thing Schlieffen reportedly said on his deathbed was, "The last soldier, his right arm should touch the English Channel." Then you turn down and you put Paris in a headlock, and they will sue for peace and you will beat them in two weeks before the big bear can come moseying along slowly. That's why mobilization was tantamount to an act of war, because it starts the timetable. They've got to defeat them in two weeks. What happens if you go through Belgium? From the point of view of the British, it's bad enough to have the sneaky French across the Channel. But what if you've got the Germans in Ostend eating moules frites? What if you have the Germans across the Channel? Big-time enemies a very short, choppy boat ride away. What's this going to do? It's going to reaffirm the alliance. Sir Edward Grey, the one who said most famously, and he got it right, "Lights are going out in Europe. They will not be relit again in our lifetime." At this point, the British hesitate. The French said, "Will the word 'honor' be struck from the English dictionary?" The French ambassador is chasing around a high official in the czarist regime in Russia saying, "You must back us all the way." So, the invasion guarantees that the worst nightmare of Bismarck will come true, that they will be trois. The fact that it doesn't work out, for a variety of reasons, the way the German high command intended, and the way Schlieffen intended, and von Moltke, means that they don't, for reasons I'll come back to, can't get Paris in that headlock, force them to sue for peace, and the race to the sea begins to try to outflank--as in a football game, to make a ridiculous analogy--the outside linebacker. They end up at the sea. Then shovels, and defensive weapons like barbed wire and machine guns, become the weapons of the war. That explains why there wasn't and subsequently could never be a knockout punch, and why millions of people died in and around those trenches.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 17 Transcript November 3, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: We're going to talk about the war today. Let's do that. I assume that you guys all saw Paths of Glory, so I'm going to talk about the mutinies in a while. Jay Winter is going to talk about essentially the Great War in modern memory. To make a nice transition to his lecture, I'm going to end with something that he wrote about how reality and art came together in a terrifying way in 1918. Okay. Now--comment faire a? Qu'est ce qu'on va faire?--so, just a few things at the beginning that are obvious. They're in the book. It didn't work out the way Schlieffen wanted it to. The point about the invasion of Belgium was that it brought Britain into the war. The Germans were counting on the fact that it would take Britain a very, very long time to raise an army, not a navy but an army of any size. What they called the British Expeditionary Force does arrive and takes its place next to the French. But it's very small and they don't have conscription until late in the war. Unlike the French, they did not have military conscription.

Basically, to make a long story short, in part because Germany, as France, as everybody was worried about the home front, basically what happens is they hurt their chances of pulling this off by moving some divisions to Alsace to try to blunt the force there. Also, some more are headed off to the eastern front, because they start to realize that the Russians are mobilizing more rapidly than they thought they could. Basically, it's possible to argue that the Battle of the Marne saves Paris and saves France. Schlieffen would have gone crazy about this. Remember, the last thing he said supposedly in his life was, "Let the last soldier touch the English Channel and then come down and hit Paris." But they turned down before that, and the first airplanes are used as reconnaissance planes. The pilots literally had to carry pistols with them at the very beginning. They had not figured out a way to put machine guns on that the bullets wouldn't hit the propeller and then come back and kill the pilot. So, all this took some doing. But the first planes were reconnaissance planes. At one point in this huge engagement featuring enormous armies, in the German case supplied by trains going many every hour across the Rhine, the French planes see that there's a big gap in the German lines. So, they counter attack in the famous story everybody knows. Again, what I want to insist on is--look at where it says Battle of the Marne. There's a town called Lagny there. Now it's practically a suburb of Paris, L-A-G-N-Y. You could hear the battle in Paris. You could hear the roll of thunder of the guns. When you ask how the French home front holds together so long, it's that the Germans are so close. In 1918, they will be close again. In 1918, they're firing this huge gun which the British soldiers called "Big Bertha." It's lobbing from way, way the hell up in the north. It's lobbing shells from behind the German lines all the way to Paris on Easter Sunday 1918. It hit an apartment house on the Church of Saint Gervais, another hit an apartment house on the Boulevard Port Royal, one on the Rue de Rivoli not too far from our place. The Germans are so close. But in 1914 what happens is that literally the commander of Paris, whose name was Gallieni. He has a mtro stop named after him. A lot of these guys do. He commandeers the Paris taxis. They are literally carrying soldiers out to the front at the Battle of the Marne. What happens is the Battle of the Marne stops the German advance and then the race to the sea begins. They try to outflank each other. Again, to borrow a ridiculous football analogy, but it's not so ridiculous. It doesn't matter if you don't follow football. If you're trying to get around the outside before the outside linebacker can get there and you're trying to turn the corner. Basically, that's what they're trying to do. Both sides are trying to turn the corner and they end up at the sea. At that point, the trenches are dug literally from the sea all the way to Switzerland.

The war, to repeat what I said the other day, only a couple people who had seen what was going on in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 could have imagined this war in which the offense was supposed to have, as in 1870-1871, every advantage. Remember the French commander said lan vital, "We need the frenetic patriotic energy. That's all we need. We need to attack and keep on attacking." It doesn't work out that way. The reason that you have all of these millions of people killed, the flower of British youth, the flower of every youth in that period, is because this offense war becomes a defensive struggle in which breaking through is almost literally impossible. Thus, backdrop to what you have seen in Paths of Glory. The weapons of the war including the shelling, most people are killed by shells in World War I than dying in any other way. There are new and horrible ways of dying, flame throwers, for example, poison gas, which is first used by the Germans at Ypres, on of the many battles of Ypres. There are twelve battles of the same river in northern Italy. There are several battles of the Somme. These battles keep on happening, because large chunks of real estate are virtually impossible to conquer. So, trenches are defensive weapons. One of the reasons that the breakthrough is impossible is that when you're going to try to break through these trenches, what they have is what they call creeping barrages. They start trying to--and lots of people died with what the Americans call friendly fire--they try to coordinate the shelling to go in advance of the people going over the top and then trying to carry sixty pounds--pick up sixty pounds some time--worth of stuff on your back, and go down into these horrible craters full of all sorts of crap, and dead floating rats, and dead floating bodies of human beings, and to try to break through. Then you run into machine guns. Machine guns which can fire what? I just saw this morning or last night. I think it's 600 rounds a minute. The Gatling guns had first been used in, I think, the American Civil War. But these are much more rapid firing. They aim basically at your knees. They just sort of go back and forth, back and forth. Then barbed wire. One of the things that soldiers had to carry with them were wire cutters. Sometimes the wire cutters weren't equal to the task of cutting the wire. It's hard to cut wire if people are firing machine guns at you as well. That's why the trenches, which you'll see some real ones in a minute, are fairly elaborate defensive weapons. Everybody has seen the footage of real battle. Sometimes--they've wrecked it, but the Imperial War Museum, which used to be much better than it is now in London, but it's really worth seeing. They used to have this amazing small clip. You see these three guys and they're about ready to go. One guy blows his whistle to say, "Follow me." The

first guy goes up and he gets his head over. Then he's dead. He falls back. The second guy goes up and he gets a little further. Then you see his body hit. The third guy, when the clip ends, is just about to get out. You don't know what happens to him, but his chances weren't very good. Breaking through. There are debates on how ridiculous these people like Nivelle were, or Foch, and Joffre and the whole gang, because they keep ordering these attacks. "The breakthrough is going to come next. We've really got them. We're going to break through." But they don't break through. And they don't break through. They can't break through. That is background for the mutinies. The first real breakthrough doesn't come until March, 1918, in the Ludendorff offensive, 1918. Then they overrun their supplies, and it kind of snaps back like a rubber band and pushes them back. The Germans, at that point, for reasons I'll explain in a minute, know that they're not going to win the war. They can't win the war. What's going to happen is that when the war ends, and more about this when we talk about the post-war, is that the war ends with German troops far inside France. How do you explain that back to the home front? The Berlin home front has started to collapse. There's great deprivation, great problems getting enough to eat. And that situation, that will make it easier, later, for Hitler and many other little would-be Hitlers to argue that you were winning, but you were stabbed in the back by the Jews, and the Communists, and the Socialists, and the peaceniks, and all of these people, from their point of view. When you do these creeping barrages, you're indicating where the attack is going to come. Behind the trenches the Germans, as do the French, have railroad lines that are used to bring in reinforcements, to bring in supplies. What you do is you bring in supplies. You bring in reinforcements. If you read a great book by Paul Fussell called The Great War in Modern Memory, it's about the war poets. It's about Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, and folks like that. Eisenberg, I quote him. I think one of his poems is in the book. That is an amazing look at the whole thing. That's a ready-made paper topic, to take a couple of those poems and talk about the war. Breaking through is very, very difficult. It's almost impossible. That's why you have the carnage. That's why you have, as I said the very first day if you were here, that there were more British soldiers killed or seriously wounded in the first three days of the Battle of the Somme, like the river, than there were Americans killed in World War I, Korea, and Vietnam. In three days. The first three days. You're talking about horrific losses. You're talking about an expectation. Try to put yourself in the same thing. I think I have that quote in there. Somebody said, "You discuss your own death as if you were discussing a lunch that you were

planning tomorrow." Someone else said, "I didn't want to die, at least until I'd finished reading The Return of the Native." That, again, is background for the mutinies. What is amazing is that--and again, the French situation because of the precariousness--it's difficult to explain how people could have continued to fight in many ways. Again, looking at the Austro-Hungarian Empire where they had huge losses. The armies hold together, really, until 1917 and even beyond the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russian case, too, is remarkable. The Battle of Tannenberg is just an amazing battle in 1914. There are so many casualties they couldn't even count them. There's so many people dead. There had never been a war like this. No one had ever seen, couldn't have imagined a war like this. The proximity, also, the English had the advantage of having the channel there. But it's one of these, if you've been to Victoria Station, it's one of these things they always say about the war, but it's true. You go to the officer's club in Victoria Station, have a decent lunch, knock down a couple pints of beer, and you're on the front and can be dead by early evening. It is said that in Kent, where the miners, these Welsh miners in Belgium, they tunnel under this sort of promontory that's sticking up, that's a defensive position for the Germans. They bring in all these munitions and they blow the thing up. They blow this huge thing up. In Kent supposedly it is said that people in Kent on and near the coast of the English Channel could actually hear the explosion. The war is that close. Of course, it's close in other ways. Imagine that you lived in a village in France or anywhere. The facteur, or, in our case, the factrice, the mail carrier comes. What you don't want to see is you don't want the mail carrier to come to your house. You don't want mail. He would be carrying a telegram saying, "Be proud of X, who has just died for" you fill in the country--Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, anywhere. So, it became a war like no other war, with the only possible exception the Spanish Civil War. It has given birth to really the greatest writing about arguably any war, certainly, in history, and arguably any events outside of maybe the rise of Hitler and National Socialism in Germany. It was like that. It really couldn't have been any other way. They're still arguing over these battles. Passchendaele, we once drove up--Passchendaele was one of these places that they first used poison gas. Now it's a lot of lotissements, in Belgium, a lot of housing developments. I just wanted to go and see there. You can't even see there where the hell that was Passchendaele was actually there. If you're going to go see these battlefields, the one to go to is Verdun, which I'll talk about in a minute. There you can go through these forts, Douaumont and Vaux, to imagine what it's like. You can see some places where they've left, in the winds, and the mists, and the terrible--

of that part of France. The one road going from Bar Le Duc, on the sacred road, supplying Verdun. You still see there's one place where they've left the guns with their bayonets. There was a lot of hand-to-hand fighting there. That's the place where Falkenhayn said, "We can afford to lose more children, more young people, more young men. We will simply outbleed them." He hurdles one attack after another over most of 1916 against Verdun. That's where so many people die. Of course, that is the background also for these mutinies. Okay. Here's the western front in 1915-1917. You can see that it really doesn't move at all. Again, there is Paris and there is fighting. By the way, these places like Reims, with the beautiful cathedral which was rebuilt thanks to the Americans after the war. The Carnegie family gave a lot of money, and ordinary people rebuilt the cathedrals. One of the great cathedrals anywhere in Europe. Reims was right on the line. Of course, Reims just got pounded. The whole place was just totally devastated. Arras, there's another example up there, right on the line. I can't remember on the first day or not if I didn't relate a story of people that we knew, now about eight years ago, who were actually killed because of World War I. They were killed. There's a family we knew who were cousins of really good friends of ours that would come down there. There was a boy the age of my daughter then. I guess he was twelve then. We met them and we had a good time talking to them. Then I asked how they were at Thanksgiving when I went over at Thanksgiving. In France we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but I had ten days, so why not? They were dead. Not the father, but the son and the mother had been killed by World War I. Their house was right in Arras and in the basement they had a fire. This was just a few--you were ten years old when this happened. This was World War I. Still killing. They were killed because there was a fire in their basement. They didn't know that on the other side of the wall were all these munitions stocked right near the front on World War I. The fire caught and it blew up the house. The father wasn't there and this little guy and his mother were killed, were blown up, killed by World War I. In the 1920s there were people killed all the time. Every couple of weeks--you still see in the paper now that they found a bomb in Berlin from World War II from all the bombing, or in Dresden and in all these other places. In World War I, there were constantly farmers who were blown up as they were plowing, constantly, as they were plowing on these battlefields around the Chemin des Dames, for example. You can see the Somme there. That's a good one to have there. But the Chemin des Dames is up near there. It's north of Soissons. Anyway, if you go to any of those dpartements, if you go to the Marne, which is where the Somme basically was, or in the Pas de Calais, which is Picardie there, there are just fields and fields

of these cemeteries there with hundreds of thousands of crosses. One can go on and on about this, but there had never been anything like it. So, war became the dominant experience in the lives of Europeans, period. No matter how old you were, you knew somebody who died. You had a relative who died, period. There are in France, where much of the fighting was--the western front fighting was there, and in Belgium, there are 36,000 communes, which is an administrative unit, 36,000. Twelve out of 36,000 had nobody killed in World War I. There are places you can go, particularly if you're in the south of France, where you can go. They were all taken. People who were skilled workers, who could work in munitions factories, could get out. There were a lot of tensions between rural and urban people, because urban people who had rationing problems said, "Oh, the rural people are hoarding their products" and stuff like that. But there are places you can go where you see these, and I'm a counter. I count things all the time. It's maddening. You'll find there's one town where seventy-four people died. A very small town in the south of France, in the Aveyron. There are hardly seventy-four houses. There's a village that's quite beautiful. It's a twelfth century church way up in the Cvennes mountains where we take tourists. When you walk there, the monument to the dead is inside the church. When you show people this beautiful Renaissance entryway, portail, there's twelve people killed in the war. You cannot count. There aren't twelve houses. You can't count twelve houses. People don't live there anymore. Hardly anyone's there. We know more about the western front and now there's some good books appearing on the eastern front, but it's the same thing in every country that you're talking about. The numbers of people killed around will make clear what the countries were that really suffered the most. They were Germany and France, followed by Russia, but also Britain. Don't forget Britain. Remember I said four empires disappear? The fifth empire arguably disappears in the end, because of dynamics caused by the war. People in the so-called colonies fighting for the British Empire, they began to think, "Why shouldn't we have independence? Why shouldn't we have freedom, too?" Of course, at the Battle of Gallipoli, which is one of the great tragedies of the war when Churchill, who had ten ideas a day and nine of them were bad, as one of his critics said, Churchill said, "We'll take the pressure off. We'll knock the Turks out of the war." They're going to have this impossible assault on Turkish fortified positions. They said, "We'll knock them out of the war with the Australians, and the Indians, and the New Zealanders. We can afford to lose them more easily. They're not really ours." Of course, that still resonates in places like New Zealand, and Australia, and India, as well it should. Anyway, that's another complicated story, and we have other stuff to

do. Read things on this. It is a phenomenal thing. Mutinies. Just a little bit to the mutinies. The Somme you can read about, and all of that. When I used to work at Vincennes, in the military archives there, because I was writing about 1830 and 1848 and all that stuff, I was reading day by day the correspondence from various regions in France. I was trying to find these documents that I knew were there. This was when I was just starting out. I wasn't much older than you guys. I'd like to think that. Younger than I once was, but anyway, whatever the song is. And I knew the stuff was there. The person that ran it was out having sort of a torrid affair with this guy all the time. So, she was never there at lunch. And she didn't know what she was doing anyway. I bribed one of the guards to let me back in the stacks where you're not supposed to go in French archives. But the guy was a stamp collector and I knew that. So, I kept leaving all these jazzy stamps on my table. Finally he said, "Oh, those are beautiful stamps. "Would you like them?" The next thing I knew I'm in the back. I remember what I saw was this huge thing of boxes. This is in the mid-1970s. This huge number of boxes that were literally chained up. They were in this cage and they were chained up, really chained up with big locks and all that stuff, big security. I said, "What's all that?" He said, "Those are the mutiny documents. Those are the documents from the mutinies in 1917." Now, finally, a guy was able to get in, because in France there's a fifty-year rule and he should have been able, fifty years after the fact, he should be able to consult documents. This guy was finally able to get exception to go work on these documents. So, the thesis that was published is very good, by a guy called Guy Pedroncini, whom I don't know, and it's on the mutiny. Now we know about the mutinies. What do we know about the mutinies that confirms what you saw in the film? Several things. The mutinies spread rapidly. They did, indeed, begin with soldiers who were being sent the front baa-ing like sheep, as if they were being sent to a slaughterhouse, because that's what they're being sent to. What's the difference between a soldier carrying sixty pounds of equipment going to some attack that's going to go nowhere, where his chances of being killed are enormous, and sheep being led to a slaughterhouse? What is the difference? Really not much, except you're dealing with a human being and not a sheep. That was a bad sign for these officers. When the mutinies started, there were only really four reliable divisions, they figured at one point, between Paris and the German lines. The incredible thing was--is because soldiers never talk about the battle when they go back. They don't talk about the battle. It was impossible to communicate what was going on. The mutinies were one of the well-kept

secrets. Nobody knew. The Germans didn't know at the time. Hardly anybody knew. Nobody is probably too strong. The mutinies involved thousands, and thousands, and thousands of soldiers. In some cases they elected people to represent them. In a few cases where the officers maintained the upper hand, they summarily shot mutineers. Do you say mutineers? I don't know, people who mutiny. I confuse these things. They were massive. But they had nothing to do with socialist, or anarchist, or pacifist propaganda at all. There were attempts. There were congresses. There was a congress in Sweden. There was another one in Switzerland. The French government would not let representatives go to those congresses. The first reaction in the high command was that, "Well, the socialists are now showing their true stripes. Anarchist propaganda is working." Look at the Bolshevik Revolution. It had not yet happened. That was in October, but the Russian Revolution in February had already occurred. It has nothing to do with it. What they objected to, they were not defeatists at all. They did not want the Germans to win the war. But they realized that they weren't going to win the war either and that this strategy was completely futile. There were cases of fraternization. They are very famous cases. Christmas 1914, on the front way up near Belgium, on the British side particularly. They start yelling back and forth, the Germans and the British. They say basically, "Screw this stuff. Why don't we take the day off?" So, the Welsh were singing Christmas carols to the Germans and the Germans were getting their best singers and singing back. They actually did get together and play a soccer game. They found a place that wasn't totally chopped up and played. In 1915 on Christmas a British soldier said, "Why don't we do the same thing?" They put him up against the wall and shot him. There were these rumors that were very persistent during the whole fighting on the western front that underneath, underneath Reims--where, after all, were all these champagne caves, or underneath Albers. That was the town where the statue of the Virgin Mary on the top of a church hung like this. The Germans said if it falls one way we're going to win. If it falls the other way, the French are going to win. That somewhere the people who are lucky enough to be alive were down there. They would come out and take food, and they would take wine rations, and stuff like that. They would take them back from the dead, and they were all partying underground. They were the lucky ones. They were all fraternizing. It wasn't that case. Still, you hear all these stories. The great war poets sort of saying, "Yeah, this German guy and a British guy find themselves in a crater, both on the verge of death, and they're discussing Nietzsche until somebody finally comes and rescues them."

A lot of this may be apocryphal. But the mutinies had to do not with defeatism; it had to do with the sheer madness of it all. It was mad. And there are still historians who are saying, "Well, the creeping barrages, if they had made them a little bit more organized then maybe the breakthroughs would have come." They're still defending the impossible after all of these years--Something happened. I want to show you these, please. I think I'm turning it off. Simon, can you? I am nul. It was very dark at the Battle of Verdun. What happens? Could you do this? Okay. These are real ones from Verdun. Verdun was 1916. It begins in February. It rains all the time in that part of France. To explain the mutinies is also to understand Verdun. This is a reconnaissance plane. Those are craters there. Those are some more craters over there. That's Fort Douaumont or Vaux. When you go to them, and you really should go to them, it's a long way from Verdun. Verdun is the town that's near there. The one I'll never forget is when you go in and you see--after the war, like as people do in churches, people would come and put plaques--the most moving one is "To my son, since his eyes closed. Mine have not ceased to cry." Next one, please. So, you'd be going in there. Those are where the plaques are, right there. In fact, that plaque that I just said is right next to that. Now, you're here and they say, "Over the top, men." You're trying to get on the other side there. How are you going to do that? That's all barbed wire around there. How are you going to do that? You can't. That's inside Vaux or Douaumont. Night patrol. Again, there's the trench. They're attacking. But you've got to climb over your own barbed wire, too. That's barbed wire that's protecting you from if they attack. The casualty rates are just absolutely phenomenal at all these. The casualty rates here are not the same as the Somme, because it wasn't a massive attack. You're defending it against the Germans. They're taking care of some people that have been hurt, carrying somebody back. The poor guy looks a little peaked there. Telephones. The Russian phone system was so bad the Germans could hear every single word that they said on the eastern front. Next, please. Well, you get the point. There's the machine guns aimed low--medical. That's fantastic to walk in there. But you have to remember that a lot of the fighting is on the outside in the mists, and the snow, and the crap. It's an amazing thing. But they held. They held. Marshall Ptain became the hero of France. He would have a later incarnation in World War II. We'll get back to him. They hold. How are you going to run up that hill carrying sixty pounds? There's a commune, by the way, called Douaumont, which is the only commune out of the 36,000 that no longer exist because it was so battered that there's a difference in height in these hills of fifty and 100 feet. It could never be rebuilt.

Next, please. We get the scene. It's amazing how little people knew. What they knew on the home front, and there's a very good book edited by Jay Winter and his friend, Jean-Louis Robert, about capital cities at war, about London, Paris, and Berlin, comparing the home front. It's really good stuff, how little people knew about this. It's like an Italian said, "Do people really imagine that we just jump up and down screaming 'Long Live Italy'?" One of the most amazing things is that people in the hell, actually that more of them didn't mutiny. That's one of the most incredible things about the whole bloody mess. They died in hell, they called it Passchendaele. That was a place where the British gained four miles, that's about seven kilometers, in exchange for 300,000 dead or wounded, 300,000. Take a football stadium like University of Michigan or UT Austin and fill it up three times, and imagine that you know those people. That's what it was like. 1917 changes everything. 1917 changes everything because two key events happen, and they're obvious. One is the Russian Revolution in 1917 in February. That's A. Then B, and this is still point number one, is the Russian Revolution in October. It's clear that the--we'll talk about this or you can read about this. The Kerensky provisional government is under tremendous pressure from the allies to stay in the war. But it is clear that when the Bolsheviks seize power in October 1917, the Russians are going to get out of the war. "Peace, land, and bread" is a powerful, powerful slogan for the Russian soldiers. It's amazing that the Russian soldiers didn't all go back to Vladivostok, or to Kazakhstan, or to wherever, that they were able to hold on as long as they did. That's going to change things. It's at that time that the second event happens. That is the Americans come into the war. The Americans--outside of places like Chicago, and Milwaukee, and Philadelphia maybe, they had lots of Germans--most people in the United States, the tendency was to want the allies to win, to fight another day, and the Americans were angered by the submarine warfare campaign. In 1915, a boat called the Lusitania was sunk. There had been warnings posted by the German government, saying, "If you're a passenger, don't go on that. You're going into a war zone." The Germans claim when the boat was sunk that it was full of munitions. The Americans and the British said, "No, it wasn't." In fact, it was. That was proved about twentyyears-ago by divers. It sunk near Ireland and lots of people died. The Germans know that the only way they can win the war is the unrestricted campaign of submarine warfare to try to keep Britain from being supplied by American supplies. Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, who won the election, kept us out of war. He takes the country into war, and eventually he can't get the Treaty of Versailles passed even by the American isolationist senate. So, the Americans go to war in 1917. I took Yale alumni, besides taking

them to the pernay to drink champagne, a lot of them wanted to go to this a long time ago, to Chateau Thierry, which is the first place that American soldiers fought in 1917. Now, it wasn't the American troops that made the difference. In the imaginary, the imaginaire, in the perceptions of the French, it was the arrival of General Pershing, who had made his career slaughtering Mexicans in Mexico. The image was that the far west was coming and these sort of gun-toting Dodge City types were going to turn the tide. That's not what happens. What turns the tide is that once the Americans are in the war, the tremendous industrial strength of the U.S. means the curves are going to cross. By that simply I mean the curves that the Germans know they aren't going to win the war. The British, and the French, and the American high command know they're going to win the war. They think they're going to win the war in 1920 or 1921, maybe 1919, if all goes well. There was a quote in there after they just had--at the cost of thousands of lives--I think it's still in there. They had gotten a couple of kilometers of territory back from the Germans. Somebody says, "At this rate, we'll get to the Rhine in the year 2006," I think is what they figured. The long duration, of being in until the end, was going to be a long time, if you were able to survive. Those are the two big events, the curves cross. 1917 is also an important year because tanks begin to make a difference. Tanks can't do anything in these craters. They get stuck. Their treads just sort of spin like a car stuck in the snow in North Haven or something. They don't make any difference until actually they can break into the open. At that point, then they can be a way of protecting infantry behind them. So, 1917 really turns it around. To make a long story short yet again, in 1918, by this time, Hindenburg and Ludendorff basically have taken over the government. Basically, the Second Reich is now controlled by the military. Of course, Hindenburg has a rather pernicious role in the long run to play. He was determined to destroy the Weimar Republic, even though he was president. As he in 1932 says, "We'll bring in the Adolf. We'll bring him in as chancellor." So, Ludendorff said, "Look, we've got to do it now. If we don't do it now, it's never going to happen." So, they throw every conceivable resource into this offensive. They do break through. They do break through. You can look at the maps in the book. They get a long way. But then it snaps back like a rubber band. They overrun their supplies, as they had in 1914, in the big war offensive in 1914. They begin to overrun their supplies. They get tired and then they're pushed back. At that point, the worst days of the bombardment of Paris have ended. The allies are sure they're going to win the war, and that the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is almost on the verge of collapse, despite the sheer inefficiency of the Italian military,

they know that it's going to collapse and that Russia's coming out of the war in the long run did not make that much of a difference. The Italians are able to stabilize the front in Austria-Hungary, and the whole thing is going to collapse. And the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the nationalities are putting forth their claims. Franz Joseph dies in 1916, and it's not going to go on that long. Finally, on the 11th of November 1918, in a railroad car near Compiegne in the forest, not very far north of Paris, they sign on the dotted line and the armistice is declared. In 1940, Hitler would accept France's surrender. It wasn't actually the same railroad car, but they told him it was, also in the forest near Compiegne in 1940. The war ended. More about this later. Basically, France in victory is not as strong as Germany in defeat. Germany is industrially a much more prosperous country. This will hang over the negotiations at Versailles, because the French demand that somebody pay for the war, which France suffered more than any other country in terms of its agricultural land being chewed up, the finest land in France, etc., etc. That's going to hang over the peace proceedings. I want to make just a few comments before I end with Jay Winter. We have five minutes left, so I'm going to do that. The highest percentage of losses was France, with 16.8 percent of those mobilized killed. In Germany, 15.4 percent killed. But if you take those in combat, it's twenty-two percent officers and eighteen percent soldiers. Remember, officers weren't all fancy generals who were sitting drinking champagne, plotting the deaths of all these people. The junior officers, and this is also the case in the British sense, the flower of British youth from Oxford, Cambridge, etc., etc., they're the ones that blew the whistle and said, "Follow me, men." And they jump over, armed with only a pistol. They're toast. They get killed in even greater percentages. Anyway, Serbia loses thirty-seven percent of all its combatants. They don't have as many. Turkey, twenty-seven percent; Romania, twenty-five percent; and Bulgaria, twenty-two percent. Now, think of this. The war starts in early August, 1914, and it ends on the 11th of November, 1918. Every day of those years, every day. Think four years back in your own lives, and then every day, 900 Frenchmen were killed every day, every day. That's a lot of telegrams. "Be proud of X." 1,300 Germans were killed every day. The death rate was higher in World War II. Of course, in World War II, the Soviet Union has an unbelievable death rate, twenty-five million people die, some of them in Stalin's Gulag, but most of them because of the war. The death rate is higher. July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 British soldiers were killed. Not just killed and wounded, dead in one day. They were there to go over the top, and they're dead at the end. Unlike previous wars, disease didn't play a major part. Unlike, for example, the Crimean War. Though the

Blue Flu, sometimes called the Spanish Flu, as you know will kill more people in 1918, 1919, and 1920, than the war. That's the pandemic. As I said, most people die of shells, followed by machine guns and flames, despite progress in medicine. Also, things like shell shock were first identified at this time after the war. Freud was very interested in that, among other people. The psychological--I wasn't--you went into the Paris Metro or the London Tube and you saw people begging with one arm, or one leg, or no legs. You saw people who had also choked out their lungs on gas or who were blind. They were all over the place. Europe was a country of widows, especially in countries like Italy where widows still wore black all the time. Europe was a country of widows. If you had a demographic curve, a triangle, it was like a shark had eaten a huge bite out of the male population between eighteen and, say, fifty-five. The length was simply staggering. The Battle of the Somme lasted five months. Gallipoli lasted more than eight months. Verdun, ten months. Ypres, in 1917, four months. On the Battle of the Somme, you talk about how war influenced people's lives, four million men participated in the Battle of the Somme, four million. That's a phenomenal statistic. More than a quarter were killed, captured, or port disparu, classified as disappeared, nothing left. Battlefields were no longer called the field of glory. That went. The language went. I make an allusion to that, which is an obvious one, at the end of what you read. Also, there's a brutalization of the sense of humanity that you lost because you were dealing with so many people dead all around. You were fighting for your life. The attitude that people had toward other people changes, and the demons of the twentieth century--fascism above all--would be built on that dehumanization. Difficult to imagine, though not impossible, the Holocaust without World War I; but given the Turks and what they did to the Armenians, it's hard to say. Also, atrocities. There were atrocities. Now there are a couple of good books on atrocities. Most of the atrocities were committed by the Germans in Belgium. They executed 5,500 Belgian civilians. Edith Cavell was the most famous, the nurse. In part because German soldiers believed that they were being picked off by civilians--is what had happened in France in 1870-1871. But the Russians committed atrocities in east Prussia and in Galicia. The Austrians, who had been told that the Serbs were subhuman, committed atrocities there. There were rapes. Rape had not yet become an arm of combat as it would with the Russians after World War II, but people were treated like animals. Hitler said in 1939, "After all, who will remember the Armenians?" That's an incredible, chilling thing. So, I want to end simply with Jay Winter, whom you're going to meet soon, assuming I can find this. It's about a

haunting film done by Abel Gance. It's called J'Accuse, I Accuse. It's not the same thing as Zola's I Accuse; it's another one. Made in 1918-1919. The hero, Jean Diaz, is a wounded soldier poet. He begins to lose his mind. He escapes from the hospital and he reaches his village. There he summons the villagers and he tells them of a dream. It starts on a battlefield graveyard with wooden crosses all here, and there, and everywhere. A huge black cloud rises above it, and magically, ghost-like figures emerge from the ground. They're wrapped in tattered bandages, some limping, some blind, walking with upraised arms stumbling blindly like Frankenstein's monster. They leave the battlefield and they go home. They go from the grave to their villages. And they want to see if their sacrifices have been in vain. And they get back to their villages and what they find is that their wives have cheated on them. They find that people are still ripping people off by false weights at the market. The petty ways have continued despite their horrific losses. They say, "You must mend your ways. We didn't go through all of this hell so that you would continue to behave like you do. The world, after all, must be a better place. Isn't it a better place now? Won't it be?" That's the big illusion, by the way, about 1920s and 1930s. The world wasn't going to be a better place. It wasn't at all. They believed their mission is fulfilled. They go back to their graves. After recounting this dream, the poet, now totally mad, accuses the sun above of standing idly by and watching the war go on. Then he dies. The oddest thing about this, about how art and reality merge, is that this film was made before the end of the war. I'll bet Gance, the producer, got permission from the army to have real soldiers be extras in his movie. You can see real people, who are not going back to the front, with their arms ripped off. Stumps. They had stumps. Some of the people who were in that movie went back to the front and were killed. They didn't survive the war. The war had taken a terrible vengeance both in art, the joys of great artistic production, but on reality, too. It's an incredible scene. Of course, things couldn't go back again. You couldn't go back to your village. You couldn't get off a bus at the end, and go back and fall into the arms of your family, and stand there with tears on your cheeks as you were counting off the names of the dead, people that you knew. Things were going to get better, but they don't. One way of looking at the entire period of 1914 to 1945, and Jay will talk about this, is to view it as an entire, more horrible Thirty Years' War, because things don't get better; they get worse, if that's even possible. On that light note, I wish you a happy election.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 18 Transcript November 5, 2008<< back Professor Jay Winter: What I'd like to do today is to talk to you about what it is that distinguishes European ideas about the shared history of the last century and the United States. What makes Europe European and what makes its sense of history different from ours. I think the primary difference between Europe and the United States will be seen in about six days, on the 11th of November, when Armistice Day is commemorated all over Europe. In fact, it's now commemorated in Eastern Europe as well as in Western Europe, since it took the fall of the Soviet Union to remind people that two million Russian soldiers died in the First World War, and that the Eastern Front was the place where the German army won the war and where the Russian Revolution came directly out of it.

So, the First World War is what made Europe in the twentieth century European. And the war created a series of wounds that, to a degree, have never healed, to a degree. The primary reason for that is the bloodshed, is the staggering casualties of a degree and magnitude that no one had ever seen before. When we talk about losses on the scale of the First World War, we enter a surreal terrain. I have great difficulty getting my mind around figures of one million casualties for the Battle of Verdun, in 1916, or just about the same number for the Battle of the Somme. The Battle of Verdun between February 1916 and November was the longest battle in history. It was ten months without a break. There was nothing like it in the Second World War. It pushed soldiers, human beings, beyond the limits of human endurance. The primary way in which this wound has been remembered is in terms of an array of commemorative practices which describe what European identity is, not only was, but is. I want to suggest that there are many reasons why the remembrance of the First World War is carried on throughout the twentieth century in a defining way. The first is technology. It's an accident that the First World War happened at the very moment that the film industry became the centerpiece of mass entertainment. Hence, this was the very first filmic war. It was filmic in a fictional way. That is to say, the technology of the day provided motion picture cameras for all major armies, and indeed they were used in all kinds of ways. The problem was they never filmed battle, or almost never filmed battle. There are one or two exceptions. But the important point is that generals and their staffs didn't want cameras on the battlefield, partly because it might produce evidence that would be useful to the other side. The other part of it is that the film might get back home. If families got to see it, then what would happen? There's a famous story of the fictional film representation of war which is one reason why I think it is so iconic as a descriptive element in European consciousness about the past. In 1916, in the middle of the Battle of the Somme--which was a six-month quagmire started by the British army on the 1st of July 1916 and ended roughly November 1916, for no gain whatsoever and a million casualties--in the middle of it, a part of the British propaganda office, it wasn't a ministry until 1918--it was all done more or less informally until then--they decided to make a film to buck up public morale. What they did was they filmed the Battle of the Somme while it was being fought. But they didn't film the fighting. They filmed mock episodes where soldiers in training would go over the top in a totally fictional representation of war. The problem was that the people who saw this didn't know that it was phony. When the film was shown in the middle of 1916, in August-September 1916--the battle started on the 1st of July--it was shown all over Britain. Twenty million people saw it. That is half of the

population of the country. There has never been a film that was seen by half of the population of any country in the world before that date or since. It broke all box office records. What it showed in silence was the preparation for the battle, the huge artillery barrage, and then men going over the top. Because of this phony--there were men who went over the top, stopped for a moment and then slid right down again, which caused women in the theaters that saw that to faint. They didn't know that this was simply nonsense, that it was fiction. I think the critical point to bear in mind, therefore, is that as a filmic war, the war turned into myth at the very moment that it was being fought. Nobody had ever seen the landscape of the dark side of the moon that was created by industrialized war between 1914 and 1918. The way it was represented by film was completely fictional. Film comes straight out of theater. It has a proscenium arch and it has a vanishing point. Anyone who's ever been anywhere near a battle will realize that battles don't have vanishing points. People vanish in them, but they go in every conceivable direction. The representation of war became a matter of myth right in the middle of the war itself. It became a battle of myth to be remembered. I'll give you another example which makes the point really powerful, very, very powerful. In February 1916 the German army decided to push through French lines at Verdun. This big ten-month battle, which is the biggest of all time, took place. In the course of it a series of completely made-up stories turned into legend. One is called the Trench of the Bayonets. What it shows is there were no trenches in the Battle of Verdun. There were isolated pockets of men in big underground forts. There was simply artillery barrage going on day and night for ten months. Little pockets of men would be caught in one part of the battle, and they stayed put to make sure that the Germans would not get through. The French line was in ils ne passeront pas. They won't get through and they didn't. One group of such men were almost certainly buried by a landslide. The weight of artillery barrage in the mud would mean the earth would move when, indeed, the artillery barrage hit a particularly wet part of the front. So, a group of men were buried alive, which is a very normal practice in the course of the First World War. The German group of soldiers, the platoon that took it, put bayonets basically sticking up out of the ground to indicate to the Frenchmen where to find the dead, so that they could be buried during a lull in the fighting. The French didn't interpret it that way. What they said was, "Here are fifteen French men who stood with their bayonets there until they were buried alive and they didn't move an inch in the passeront pas." This is a completely made up story. But it became a sacred site commemorated every 22 nd of February 1917, 1918, 1919. In other words, the war itself created a mythic set of

representations of war that have come up to the present. The Great War created myth in other ways. Another one came from the landing in Gallipoli. Gallipoli was a Turkish peninsula south of Istanbul, Constantinople then. It's about a four-hour taxi drive in lousy traffic. It probably took longer then. The idea of the Allies was to knock Turkey out of the war, help Russia and possibly encircle Germany by not attacking directly through the western front, but coming around through Asia Minor. This landing was a catastrophic failure. It was the brainchild of Winston Churchill who, until 1940 when Hitler made him the great man that we all remember, was a complete failure. politically and in military affairs. Gallipoli was his idea, and he shared in the form of what is now called Orientalism, a complete underestimation of the capacity of Muslim populations, Asian populations, brown people, to fight against Europeans. So, nobody had a look at the ground where the Allies were supposed to land at Gallipoli. They didn't actually take account of the fact that there were very big cliffs to climb. When they got there, they just reproduced trench warfare that had already existed. It was a complete failure. The landing, though, took place on the night of the 25th of April 1915, and the people used for it were Australian and New Zealand troops, alongside British and French ones. That landing was the birth of the Australian nation. To this day, Anzac Day--Australia, New Zealand Expeditionary Corps--Anzac Day is sacred. It's the 4th of July in Australia. It's the moment of celebration, through the shedding of blood, the winning of national pride. The point I'm trying to make initially is that remembering the First World War is remembering sacred themes that define nations. The oddity of the First World War is that these nations were defined first of all because they're a part of imperial powers, but this war was at the one and the same time the apogee and the beginning and the end of empire. Hence, nations that affirm their loyalty to Britain by dying on the beaches of Gallipoli, or in the hills of Gallipoli, earned the right to break away from Britain. This sacred moment is how the Great War turned into myth. If you think this is light, you're mistaken. This is big-time politics to this day. Yesterday, in the Sydney Morning Herald, two Australian politicians virtually came to blows about how to remember Gallipoli, because it is at the core of the notion or of the idea of what the nation has to be. The first point I want to make is remembering the First World War is remembering a series of myths. They're iconic in the sense that they describe not just what happened at a particular moment, but they describe what the rest of the twentieth century might become and did become. And that is the second point I think I'd like to draw to your attention. What makes remembering the First World War so important is that it became the way in which war was configured throughout the twentieth century in Europe. In many respects, this

is a defining difference between the United States and Europe. The Second World War in this country is quite different from the First. The United States didn't really suffer the injuries of any major European country in the First World War. One hundred thousand American soldiers died in the First World War. Perhaps 40,000 of them, and there's a dispute on this, but perhaps 40,000 of them died from the Spanish Flu, the worst influenza epidemic in history. It hit everybody. It hit civilians. It hit soldiers. But it particularly preyed, as many mutant viruses do, on young adults. So, it got soldiers. Well, 100,000 dead was roughly, just roughly, what the British army suffered in three weeks on the Battle of the Somme, in one battle. The scale of casualties in the First World War is what makes it everybody's business. The second reason why remembering the First World War is iconic is that it is universal in Europe. It's family history. Let me give you an example of what that means. If you ever visit the extraordinary power of individual graveyards at the scene of the landings at Normandy, you will find that there are graves of 3,000 American soldiers who died in the course of the first day of the landing on the 6th of June 1944. That landing on the 6th of June 1944 was terrible. It was an extraordinary day. It was a day that should be remembered and is remembered. If any of you see the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan, you'll see it. It is iconic. It should be. The first day of the Battle of the Somme, on the 1st of July 1916, was 20,000 British men killed. The first day of the landing at Normandy, 3,000 Americans killed. The landing at Normandy, compared to the Battle of the Somme, shows us that the iconic battle for Britain of the First World War was six times as murderous in one day as the landings at Normandy. That sheer scale of casualties means that remembering the Great War means remembering loss of life that became universal throughout families, throughout Europe. This is extraordinary in many respects. Until 1914, war was not democratic. Military service was not democratic. Either it was aristocratic and rural, in terms of the officer corps, that's why the cavalry mattered so much. They came from the land. Or it was more or less the men whom the general who defeated Napoleon, Wellington, put it, who were "the scum of the earth." Either the unemployable overpopulation of major cities, or indeed the unemployable populations of rural life in Europe, as well. Now, what happens in 1914 is conscription, universal conscription antedating the war presented armies of a size that had never before been pulled together. These armies suffered casualties of roughly one out of eight killed and one out of three

wounded. We're talking about seventy million men in uniform in the First World War, nine million men killed, roughly twenty-five million men wounded. One out of every two men who served in the First World War was a casualty. There were eight million prisoners of war. In those camps illness was likely to kill you more than anything else. The critical thing to bear in mind, therefore, is that the First World War created an astonishing and unprecedented challenge of commemoration. The first challenge was the missing. I want to take you through the commemorative forms that the First World War created, which created cultural practices that are still very important today. Anybody going to England today--and I mean today, I was there last weekend in Oxford--will see everybody wearing a little red poppy in your lapel. This is what you buy for a couple of pennies, whatever you want to give as a contribution to a charity called The Royal British Legion, the biggest charity in Britain. It is still to this day the biggest charity for those families, and indeed survivors, and successive generations of those who served their country and who were wounded or died in it. The critical thing to bear in mind about this is that the mythic representation of war, which came out of film, has been matched by what I would call a family representation of war that comes through cultural practices of remembrance. We should never ever get away from the fact that remembering is a business. People make money out of it. That's why films sell so well. The History Channel is dominated by stories about war. It's an important thing to bear in mind that people make money out of representing war. It's an important thing to keep in mind. But that's too cynical to suffice for a discussion of how the First World War was remembered. It was remembered and still is remembered within families. The answer to "Why is that?" It's because of the universalization of bereavement. What's the problem? The problems are threefold. The first is the missing. The second is, in some sense, the irrelevance of conventional religious practices. The third is the search for some kind of collective statement of why these men died. For what? What price, victory? The missing. Half of those men who died in the First World War, and we're talking about nine million men, have no known graves. Not a trace of them exists. This, by the way, is exactly the same proportion of those who were killed at Ground Zero on 9-11. Half of them have vanished completely. There are traces that matter a great deal to the families of the survivors, the survivors who need something to remember, to mourn. The fact that roughly four million men died without a trace made commemorating war very, very difficult. Conventional religious practices require a site, a grave, a place to go to where individuals can honor those who die and take their lives up once again, let the loss go. What

possible ways do they have to handle this? During the war, nothing. Because the confusion over casualties of war, which always happens in wartime, was overwhelming. If a family got a message saying, "Your husband," "Your brother," "Your son," "Your fianc is missing in action," it could mean anything. It could mean that the individual was in a prison camp on the other side of the line. It could mean that the individual was in a hospital. It could mean that there was a confusion of identity and that the person was still alive, but somebody else found his dog tag. It could mean that the person had been blown to pieces and there was nothing that remained of him. None of that could be sorted until the end of the war, and even then it couldn't be sorted out. The loss of knowledge, the lack of knowledge about the most fundamental question of war is the most poignant origin of a series of commemorative practices that followed it. Given the scale of the losses, the conventional churches were not able to handle the problem of helping the bereaved or those who were, as it were, in no man's land, in Purgatory. In fact, Purgatory is an interesting idea. If you think about it, it's centered to a certain kind of popular Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Purgatory means that people who are on the way to heaven have to wait a while, and maybe, maybe just the good works that you and I might do will help them get there sooner, rather than later. It's a medieval idea. The Catholic Church had to jettison the idea of Purgatory, which died in the First World War, because no one wanted to put up with the idea that an individual who died for his country had to wait for 100 years in Purgatory in order to be able to get to heaven. Religious practices had to change to handle the unprecedented losses of war. Those who went to the churches for solace found very little, because there was very little the churchmen could do, could say. Why did I lose three sons? What did they die for? The phrases, the noble phrases of patriotism last only so long, and most of the time don't get you through the night. Well, what did individuals do? The first thing they did was to move to the pagan perimeters of Christianity. John Merriman referred you to a wonderful film by Abel Gance about the return of the dead called J'Accuse, I Accuse, which is accusing war, accusing the sun of not stopping war. It's accusing everybody of this insanity that had no end to it. Well, the pagan perimeters of Christianity are the areas where the occult lives. It's the areas where people believe, faute de mieux, because they have no choice in extra sensory perception. This is a period not just of the film industry, but the emergence of radio. It's a world where telegraphy was a quite normal means of communication, with underground cables, Reuters dispatched stories all over the world. For millions of families the idea of getting in touch with the missing or the dead seemed quite appealing. These are not fools. These are not people

who are, as it were, bought by the Elmer Gantrys of this world. These are ordinary people or very intelligent people who are prepared to suspend disbelief about extrasensory perception in order to be able to find some solace, some way of understanding the world in which they live. There was an extraordinary efflorescence, development of spiritualism, of sances. One of the great carriers of this message was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the author of the great, the ultimate rationalist, Sherlock Holmes. When his son died and was missing, completely missing, he became one of the great figures in the development of the spiritualist movement. Churches have no part in that because speaking to the dead has no mediation. Christianity couldn't be interested in this. Jewish religion has no time for it. Islam has no time for it whatsoever. But it just shows you that the scale of the catastrophe of the human loss of the First World War challenged conventional institutions and frameworks for understanding what was happening. If sances are a kind of collective remembrance, they created, as it were, the precedent for the ones that have left their most powerful marks, not only on Europe but beyond it, as well. These are war memorials. The need to create a substitute tomb, a substitute place in front of which to mourn, is what creates the extraordinary vogue of war memorials. You don't have to go very far to see them. All you have to do is go through Commons, and you'll see two war memorials that were created at the same moment, right after the First World War. When you see the names of Civil War vets who were Yale men, when you go through Commons on the walls, you should recognize that was completed in the 1920s, at the same time as there is a faade, a war memorial in front of Commons with the names of the battles that American soldiers fought in. In front of that is a cenotaph. The cenotaph, an empty tomb, says that these men died for liberty, and so on. It is an empty tomb. This is the critical point to bear in mind. The enormous development of commemorative forms, in particular sculptured, architectural war memorials in the twentieth century, comes from the First World War. Anyone who goes--and I think it's marvelous that we can talk about this in this particular room. Anyone who goes to see Maya Linn's Vietnam Veterans Memorial will see an outcome of a lecture on First World War commemoration that took place in this room, where Maya Linn was a student. She studied First World War memorials in order to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Why? If you go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial you'll understand the genius of First World War commemoration. The only thing that matters are the names. The names are what matters. The highly-polished granite surface of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has your own reflection forced back upon you, to touch the names is the way to find a means, inadequate perhaps,

symbolic perhaps, to bring the dead back home, to bring them to the center of American history in the middle of the Mall at the intersection between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington memorial. It is an extraordinary gathering together of the bones, of the remains of the dead who were buried in Europe or never found. Why does this matter? It matters because the universalization of mourning, of bereavement in the First World War meant that these war memorials are all over Europe. They're everywhere. There are 38,000 of them in England. Every village has one. Every commune, I think, bar twelve in all of France. There are 30,000 of them in France alone. These war memorials are extraordinary in many respects. I want to tell you about them today. They are places where, next Tuesday, on the 11th of November, there will be ceremonies. It's a public holiday in France. The mayor of the town will be at the head of a procession--this is choreographed all over the country--in which there will be 100 school children who will march in the rain and the sleet, it doesn't matter, to the local war memorial. What happens then is that the mayor reads out the names of those from a small village or from a town who died in the First World War. The children in the school after the name of Cohen Albert will say "prsent," will answer for the men who aren't there. This bonding between the living and the dead, the bringing back of the dead to their own villages, to their homes, was a substitute burial ceremony for the ones that could never take place. How did it all happen? The first point that has to be made is that the commemorative wave took place through political leadership. Politics means many things. The first thing it has to mean is that there is a fundamental difference between the way in which men are remembered in the winners and in the losers. In the case of Germany, where there were two million soldiers who died in the First World War, this is an enormously difficult problem. The reason is that you not only need to remember the dead, but you have to find a way and a form to answer an eternal question. The question is: how is it possible to glorify those who die in war without glorifying war itself? The extraordinary wave of commemorative activity, the cultural practices of commemoration that were universal in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s have many different answers to it. Most of the time what happens is that politics became local, that small groups of people in small towns and villages took it upon themselves to answer the question: What will we do? How will we remember the men of our village? Given the numbers, we're talking about three, four brothers in agrarian towns. We're talking about fathers and sons who never came back. We're talking about the absolutely personal, face-to-face culture of village life. Everyone knew the names. Everybody knew the families. What this means is that it may be the case that

high politics set out certain lines--the cabinets, the politicians, the generals. But what's extraordinary about Europe between the wars is how democratic commemoration was, and how much life there was in civil society in order to create forms that were separate. That's why I mentioned the poppy fund. This is a private organization. It's not a public charity. It's not the state. It's civil society speaking its compassionate language of remembering not only the fallen, but those left behind, the widows, the orphans, and so on. I'll give you an example of how civil society and state power differ and vary. On the 14 th of July 1919, just two weeks after the signing of the peace treaty on the 28th of June 1919, when the Germans were forced to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there was a victory parade in Paris. That victory parade had a march past the Champs-Elyses, through the Arc de Triomphe. It's only happened twice in history and this was one of them, to celebrate the victory. The French were there. The Americans were there. The Brits were there. The Italians were there. All the Allies were there. There are two things that happened. One was that Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, decided in this spectacle, "We need a symbol of the lost generation." So, he had a papier-mch catafalque built, a very big ornate plinth. On top of it was a cenotaph, an empty tomb, to symbolize the tombs of all those soldiers who died in the war, half of whom have no known graves. To start the victory parade, Clemenceau insisted that the people who lead the way are the most badly mutilated men of the war, the gueules-casss, men with broken faces, the men without arms, the men without legs. The use of this vanguard of the suffering transformed a victory parade into a day of mourning. This was extraordinary. It was absolutely extraordinary. The Brits decided if there's going to be something on the 14 th of July, we'd better do something, too. It'll take five days for us to get everybody back over. On the 19 th of July we need a victory parade, too. Three-quarters of a million British men died in the war, another 250,000 from the empire and so on, dominions. A million men from the British forces died in the First World War. We need a victory parade. So, they asked the architect, Edwin Lutyens, to put together another papier-mch memorial called The Cenotaph, an empty tomb. They put it right in the middle of Whitehall, official London, right next to 10 Downing Street, next to Buckingham Palace, basically a small stroll down to the houses of parliament, right in the middle of official London. They had their parade. But that wasn't the end of it. Two million people came to it, and they all deposited whatever they had to offer to the dead of the Great War, because this was an empty tomb. It wasn't the empty tomb of Christ. It was a Greek form. This drove the churchmen leading the

Church of England apoplectic. It meant that the language of commemoration was ecumenical and not Christian. Why should that be? Lutyens was the man who designed New Delhi. He was the architect of empire. He wanted a memorial that would suffice for Hindu soldiers who had died, Muslim soldiers, Jewish soldiers, Anglican, Catholic, Irish, whatever, people of no belief at all, and he found it. He found the simplest possible way. As a result of this extraordinary outpouring of feeling, literally flowers they kept on having to shovel away because there were so many things left. Understandably. These are families who finally found a way to express perhaps a form of symbolic exchange. It happens in the Vietnam Wall, too. People leave things. Why? These people whose names are on the wall, those people who died, represented by the cenotaph have given everything. I need to give something. Pilgrimage is hard. It's not tourism. It should be difficult. You should give, not just get. The critical thing there is that clearly the British people voted with their feet for the national war memorial. So, the cabinet said, "Lutyens, could you do it again, this time in stone?" He did. He did it again in stone. A year later when the Unknown Soldier was buried in Westminster Abbey, where did people go? They went and paid their respects. You can still do it today. The Abbey is the home of kings and poets. No, the people's monument is The Cenotaph in Whitehall, not the church of the kings, but it's the sacred space of the people. It remains so to this day. Now, that man, Edwin Lutyens, designed another set of war memorials that lead us directly to Maya Linn. Thiepval, T-H-I-E-P-V-A-L is a small village that no longer exists in the Somme, in northern France. There he was asked, eighteen years later, to do a memorial for the 73,000 British soldiers who died in that one battle, and have no known graves. What he created was an extraordinary arc, an Arc of Triumph that basically has small arches on top of it and then nothing. He reduced the Arc of Triumph to nothingness. The only thing you do is when you walk up to it, my eyesight is dreadful, but younger people do it too. It just depends. When you get close--for me it's very close, for other people it's further away--you all of a sudden see that the walls of this arch that he built in Thiepval are completely covered with names. There's a vanishing point where you suddenly see them. From a distance you can't see it. It just looks like a faade. There are the names. It's that which Maya Linn heard about in this lecture hall, when Vincent Scully talked about Lutyens and commemoration, that inspired her to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She's told me what it felt like to sit in this room and do it. She actually submitted her design for that memorial as the design that was ultimately the winning design in the competition. It

was anonymous. By the way, she got a B+ for it in her class. I'll leave that aside. "'Judgment is mine,' sayeth the Lord." All I can do is to tell you that the forms that were created in the cenotaph were ones that have endured throughout the twentieth century to describe how war is remembered. Now, The Cenotaph, as I say, is pre-Christian. It's one more move away from the institutionalization of religion. It's not that the sacred died in twentieth-century Europe; it moved out of the churches. It can be found elsewhere. One of the places where it will be found next Tuesday is in front of war memorials that were placed all over villages, towns, marketplaces, all over Europe. Let me return to that process. The first I said is political. Small groups of people, the busybodies, the committeemen that always exist in small towns with nothing better to do, retired men or men of leisure, sometimes women. What they did was, "We want to design this ourselves." The first thing you have to figure out is: How much does it cost? Hence, we should always recognize that commemoration is a business. The cost factor actually matters substantially. The reason why it matters substantially is that if you want something sculptural, if you want something like a piece of architecture, the cheapest possible form of stone is an obelisk. You don't have to do much. You just hack it here or there and that's it. It has a great advantage, which is that it's Egyptian; it's pre-Christian again. It doesn't require you to distinguish between Protestant, Catholic, Jews, or anybody else. It's an ecumenical form and it's the most popular one. The second problem is that in France, in particular--Germany has its own headaches--but in France, in particular, church and state had been separated in 1905, and rather violently separated. No crosses, except in some Catholic areas where they said, "I don't really care. We're going to have a cross no matter what," which is true in Catholic Brittany, in the northwest of the country. Most of the time there are not crosses. What they show primarily are two kinds of representations. The first is of a Gallic rooster, which again could be bought through a mail order catalog, or a soldier, the poilu. The British liked to see their soldiers shaved. For the French, the idea of a soldier should be somebody who's a hairy one, a poilu, somebody who never shaved. Having a beard is being masculine, being a tough guy, being a soldier who won the war. A poilu could be bought, again, on a mail order catalog. Overwhelmingly, and this is a very important point, overwhelmingly, the images are not triumphal. They are mournful. Again, these were decided by small groups of people who put together money in order to describe the ways in which war memorials should be organized, should be designed, and, indeed, should be paid for. They were paid for by popular subscription overwhelmingly, pennies, sous, francs, deutschmarks, whatever, whatever you

had. That's the way it was done. What about the inscriptions? Once more I want to reinforce the point that I made earlier about the democratic nature of loss. Ninety-five percent of war memorials list people either alphabetically or by the year or the time in which they died, the sequence of their death. Only five percent of all war memorials in Europe that I've ever seen, and I've tried to collect material all over the place on this, have men listed by rank. There is a democracy of death and of commemoration in highly inegalitarian societies. It is something extraordinary that goes on when loss is so general it becomes apparent that it isn't possible to separate those who died in uniform, in high rank, from those who died as private soldiers. One important point to bear in mind is that once the choice of place was made, and the choice of form was made, and the money was gathered together and paid to the artist or the sculptor who would do this, then we come to the third part of the commemorative process. The first is political. By that I mean small politics more than big politics. The second is business, the money, the commissioning, the putting together of the project. The third is the ritual. What do people do when they stand in front of a war memorial? The answer is very different things. The first thing that happens in the front of war memorials, and it still happens, is that women enter the narrative of war. Women are at the center of the commemorative practice. They are not at the center of the narratives of war from the battlefield or, indeed, from the military perspective itself. There are those who believe that, indeed, the gendering of the narratives of war separates the stories told by soldiers in novels and memoirs from those of the societies for which they fought and for which they died. I'm not sure if that is true or not. But what we can say, and there are thousands of photographs that show it, is that the ritual that happens in front of memorials are rituals of families. In conventional terms, by that I mean historically overdetermined ways, women have been associated with mourning practices since the Egyptians. There are tombs in the Valley of the Queens in Luxor that show professional mourners, women who have tears painted on their cheeks, from the time of the pharaohs. Whether that is true or not, the notion of Mater Dolorosa, Stabat Mater, "His mother was there," is a Catholic trope of great power and importance in understanding how societies configure loss of life in war. So, the first point is that women and children, families are there. The second is there is a didactic function. School children come there. This, I think, is a very important point to bear in mind. Overwhelmingly, and this is true in Germany until the 1930s, Italy it's true until the late 1920s, and it's true all over Britain and France, and certainly in the dominions. The rituals have a by-word that dominates the message. It is "never again," the phrase we frequently

associate with the Holocaust, with the war against genocide. Yes, that's true, but the phrase "never again" comes out of the First World War. It's what dominates the commemorative practices of the inter-war period. This is the war to end all wars. This is the war that makes war impossible. This is a war so dreadful that it is not at all the purpose of those who go to commemorative forms to prepare the next generation for their turn. On the contrary. The notion of commemoration in inter-war Europe is "never again." That explains why the commemorative power of the period around the First World War is not repeated after the Second. In France you can see this anywhere. In Britain it's there, too. In Germany there are more difficult reasons, obviously, to handle this. In Eastern Europe, where the massacres were so gigantic, it's almost impossible. What happens in Western Europe is that the names of those who die in the Second World War are tacked on to First World War memorials. Part of the reason is financial. If the First World War impoverished Europe, the Second World War bankrupted it. Without the Marshall Plan, who knows? The important point is that there's another reason. How many times can you say, "never again"? If the idea was that these men died to make war impossible, in other words, their sacrifices were such as to eliminate the need for their children to go to war again, then what do you do in 1939? This is true in Germany, too, where the 1st of September, 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War was not greeted by marching bands, and parades, and so on. It was a day of sadness in Germany as it was elsewhere, because everybody knew, and they knew the costs; the Great War had told them what war is. The conclusion I want to draw on is this. Remembering the First World War has taken many different forms. I've dealt with the filmic mystification of it. There's a big business in novels, in memoirs, in an area of what we might call factoids that are half fictional and half true. Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That is still in print eighty years after he wrote it. There are many such novels, All Quiet on the Western Front, that are enormous bestsellers. We should accept the fact that the media matters. I think the critical point to bear in mind is that the casualties of the First World War were so devastating that even the losses of the Second World War didn't change the landscape of remembrance that was constructed between 1918 and 1939. War means something in Europe that it doesn't mean in this country. The reasons can be found in all of these commemorative practices. It is clear to me that political culture follows history, follows the understandings people develop of the world in which they live. Europeans see war differently from Americans. It doesn't stop there from being militaristic groups, and those like the Nazis who wanted to "get it right this time around," and reverse the verdict of 1918 under the Treaty of

Versailles. But there's no doubt in my mind that the First World War message of "never again" survived the Nazis, survived Stalin, to create a different kind of Europe in which armies don't matter anymore. They're there. But in the question of a great historian, James Sheehan from Stanford, who just wrote a history of twentieth century, and the question that he put in his title, we have, I think, the final legacy of the commemoration of the First World War. His book is entitled Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? In late-twentieth-century Europe, states are defined in terms of the way in which they defend the wellbeing of their populations. No longer are states defined in terms of the military force that they can deploy in defense of their national interests or their imperial power. The First World War put, as it were, the beginnings--hammered in the nails in the coffin of the old vision that the state is that institution which has the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. The story of warfare killed the old idea of state sovereignty. It wasn't dead before the Nazis made it necessary for us to develop something different. But it is the remembrance of the First World War which left traces in families, which are the most powerful reasons why the First World War has become and remains the iconic disaster that has created a Europe that no one had ever seen before, and that was vastly different, in the minds of ordinary people, than the Europe that existed in 1914. Thank you very much. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 19 Transcript November 10, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today I want to talk about the Russian Revolution. I want to do just a couple things at the beginning. Then I'm going to--I hope you weren't in Jay's class "The Age of Total War" last year, because I gave almost the same lecture in it. In fact, I might have done it this year, too. As you know, I have him come in, then he has me go into theirs. But what I want to do is see the Revolution through the eyes of Nicholas and Alexandra, for the last part. But first, just a couple things at the beginning. Picking up on something that I said when we talked about 1848, the Russian Revolution is a perfect way to see revolution as process at work. You know, read the chapter. The revolution in February, as I said before, people wake up and there are not a lot of troops around, and people are hungry, and the--and I'll talk more about this in a minute--autocracy falls rather quickly and rather easily. It's at that point when you've got the provisional government of Kerensky. It's at that point that, as in 1848, and as in 1789 and the following years, people who want to shape the future of the country put in their claims. That's when social and political conflicts increase dramatically. The context of the war is, of course, mind-

boggling, with the front not all that far away from Petrograd--because St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the war, because it was a more Russian name. Those groups, like the Mensheviks whom you read about, the Bolsheviks--Lenin comes back on the sealed train--the Kadets, liberals, and those people who wanted czarist restoration, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, of which Kerensky was one, who have the most influence in Russia of any dissident party by far. They would be allies, especially the leftwing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, of the Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Then they're dismissed and persecuted like the others. But they all put forward their claims. All the kinds of tensions, and the "Kornilov plot," in quotes, which you can read about, and the July Days, and all of that really reflect the revolutionary process. What happens in October is the Bolsheviks, after one attempt that didn't work, are able to seize power. So, Leon Trotsky--who ends up, as you know, with an ice pick planted through his neck in a garden in Mexico City, assassinated on the orders of Stalin--and Lenin and the very young Stalin, who was in Siberia at the time of the February revolution, the Bolsheviks come to power and the Soviet Union is created. Next week I'll talk about Stalin and Stalinism. Today it's enough to talk about the Russian Revolution. Before I go back and tell you about Nicholas and Alexandra, and the crazed Rasputin and those folks, nobody expected there would be a revolution, that the Marxist revolution or version would come to Russia. Populists, who in the middle decades of the nineteenth century believed that the Russian peasantry was a potentially revolutionary force, people like Bakunin, whom I've talked about before. They thought that the peasants would rise up one day and sweep away their masters, to whom they were indentured as serfs until 1861. That's not that long before World War I and all of that. But for Marx the revolution had to come where you had a class-conscious proletariat that had been organized by this revolutionary elite, sort of a top-down organized revolutionary elite. That would come in Germany, in Britain, in France, eventually maybe in the United States. After the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin is still convinced that the revolution is going to come in Germany. In fact, the Spartacists do rise. They were a real far-left revolutionary group full of some very good people, incidentally, like Rosa Luxemburg who ends up being murdered. She was born in Zamosc, in what then was Russian Poland. The revolution had to come where you had an industrial proletariat. But it doesn't. Or does it? I'm a little ambiguous there, but let me say that because the revolution starts in Petrograd, that the way Petrograd was in 1917 an administrative, czarist, autocratic capital constructed by Peter the Great. But it's also a huge, enormous industrial center with hundreds of thousands of industrial workers.

The historians still debate whether by October, that is, after February during the provisional government time, the Socialist Revolutionaries or the Bolsheviks had more influence in the soviets. That's where the Soviet Union comes from. In the soviets, which were organizations of workers, sailors, and soldiers. Marx wasn't all wrong. The role of the industrial workers in St. Petersburg is very important in this. Lots of them get betrayed. They all get betrayed, ultimately, because what was going to be the workers' paradise, it ain't that. And workers' self-management, it didn't become that. It didn't become that at all. They're shocked when the Red Guards are putting down their strikes. But in the beginning, the role of the workers on the periphery--remember center and periphery is terribly important. I talk a little bit about this in what you're reading. Along the Nevsky Prospect you have government buildings. You've got the Singer Sewing Machine Company. You've got tramways. I haven't been to St. Petersburg since au temps des camarades, since the fall of communism, but very fancy stores in 1917, very dolled-up people, very rich people. Then the tramway simply stopped in the mud when they reached the periphery, when they reached the working-class suburbs. The glittering lights of the big department stores that would make you think of London, and Paris, and Berlin, and Vienna, and the big fancy hotels, all lit up with doormen clicking their heels as the well-heeled enter and leave, even during the war. There weren't any lights, or very few, when you got into the working-class suburbs. The one thing to keep in mind is that the Russian Revolution, both that of February and that of October, was a popular revolution. This was no sort of a coup d'tat carried out by a couple of extremely organized, determined politicos. Lenin was organized and he was determined. Lenin was not what the French would call rigolo. He was not a barrel of laughs. He was sure of himself. He had very little sense of humor. He had biting sarcasm. I guess I quote once in there, when he would argue with somebody he said, "He who does not understand that understands nothing." He was very, very sure of himself, a very difficult man to get along with. I'll leave it to you to think was Stalinism inevitable in Leninism? I'm not so sure it was. Anyway, the revolution was a popular revolution. The fall of the autocracy, the masses did not rise up to save the czar. They did not, and the czarina. "Bread, land, and peace." "Bread, land, and peace" is a very, very important slogan when you've got millions of people under arms from all of the nationalities, some of whom didn't know Russian at all, many of whom when they go into the war don't know the difference between a gun and a pitchfork. Until the very end, Nicholas and Alexandra, who are not very loveable people--one can feel sorry for them, and you will feel sorry for them. They end horribly. But they still had the beliefs that the Russian people loved their czar, and that they would pour forward to save the czar, and

the czarina, and the autocracy. And they didn't. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 1918, pulls Russia out of the war and all that. That's just a couple of things that the beginning to say. It's all in the book. Still, it's a very interesting revolution. There's a lot of great literature on the Russian Revolution in English. I don't read Russian at all, but in all sorts of languages. Now, having just sort of that set that up--reserved seating, VIP? What is this? I don't know. Anyway, there's nobody there--Let's talk about--did I do all that? Yeah--Let's talk about Nicholas and Alexandra. The czar. Nicholas was a family guy. He enjoyed his family. They played tennis. They were modern people. They had bicycles. They pedaled around. The bicycle was a relatively recent invention, as you know. The first big bicycle races in Europe are already in the 1890s. Like his cousin, Nicholas II, he had some general education in the political economy, in math and geography, and foreign languages, which he spoke very well, and in military science. But he had very little intellectual interest at all. Built into the way he looked at the world was this inherent suspicion of rationality, of the Enlightenment. He was somebody who, and his wife also, would still blame, if he discussed it, Peter the Great for having really incorporated, in some ways, rational organization and the Enlightenment, at least the works of the philosophes, into Russia long before that. He believed that waging war was a matter of honor. In that he shared lots with his wacko cousin, Wilhelm II. He was hardworking in the sense that he read or listened to reports on all that was going on about the war. Mark Steinberg has published some of the letters. Mark Steinberg is a friend of mine who teaches at Illinois. If I remember correctly, the czar believed that the nobles had compromised the fate of the autocracy in some ways, or threatened it by being indolent and not working hard enough. His view was always that he was the father of his people, that he was the holy czar. Again, everybody has seen pictures of him sitting on a horse, blessing the kneeling soldiers as they're going off to fight in 1914. He constantly referred to his ancestors, the Romanovs. "Only the state which preserves the heritage of the past is strong and firm," he wrote. "We ourselves have sinned against this and God is punishing us with the war." He took command of the Russian army in 1915 against the advice of his wife. He didn't usually go against the advice of Alexandra, the advice of his ministers, and the advice of the mad monk, Rasputin. Obviously, one of the reasons that people argued against this was (a) he really wasn't a military guy, and (b) if it doesn't go well, will people blame the czar? Will the role of the czar be diminished? He had a strong sense of what he considered moral, and it was shaped by his Orthodox religion. His wife, about whom I'll have more to say, was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy.

Like many converts from one religion to another, was absolutely fanatic in her attachment. He was more relaxed about religion than his wife was, but he often spoke about this sort of religious ecstasy that he felt when he went to church. Historians now say, "It's too easy to shape discourse about the Russian Revolution around the influence of Rasputin." But in fact, Rasputin in 1914 had warned that war would bring God's punishment upon Russia, and great destruction, and grief without end. Rasputin did have great influence with the family. In one letter--again, Mark put this stuff together--the czar wrote, "When I am worried or doubtful or vexed, I only talk to Gregory for a few minutes to feel myself immediately soothed and strengthened." One of the reasons that Rasputin had so much influence on the royal family was, of course, tragic illness. Alexi, the son, was a hemophiliac. Hemophiliacs, I guess now they can treat it easier than they could before, but when hemophiliacs get a scratch they can bleed. The blood does not coagulate and they can die. He was not in good health at all. Rasputin, on a couple of occasions, got lucky and predicted the end of a spell, as they used to call them, or an episode of hemophilia, and everything worked out okay. This increases the belief of these parents in the power, if you will, of Rasputin. When there was a mutiny in the navy he wrote, "If you find me so little troubled, it is because I have the firm and absolute faith that the destiny of Russia, of my own fate, and that of my family are in the hands of Almighty God, who has placed me where I am. Whatever may happen I shall bow to His will." This kind of fatalism you would see to the end, when after the revolution he's on a train and he finally has to turn back. This sort of fatalism was part of it. Rasputin by then at that point was already dead. He'd been assassinated. Even the story of his assassination, it was almost impossible to kill him. They kept hammering him with huge rocks and pumping one bullet after another into him. The people that wanted to get him out of the way. They finally, after sort of beating the hell out of him and pumping one bullet after another into all parts of his body, they threw him into a lake weighted down with rocks. When they brought the body up and did an autopsy, they found out that he died of drowning. Anyway, his influence over the czar in a way helped accentuate this sort of fatalism that was almost predetermined, you could say, by his religious orthodoxy. But if you're going to be the autocratic czar, father of all the people, you don't want any political institution that's going to limit your will. Now, the Duma, the assembly, had been created in 1905 after the revolution--which I trust that you have read about--in 1905, and the role of the Russo-Japanese War facilitating that. He believed that even the existence of the Duma would compromise the virtues of autocracy. As you know, the Duma loses most of what authority it had been given. The Duma seemed to

be a rational organization and this didn't fit terribly well in a worldview that believes in faith feeling as opposed to reason, and has a particular, and sometimes peculiar, idea of morality shaped by the traditions of Mother Russia. He and his wife look back to this sort of imaginary time before Peter the Great, when the true Russia did not look westward at all, and was not tempted by these foreign imports. He idealized that time of piety, the unity between the czar and his people, the narod. In 1902, he wrote a letter to Alexandra when he was on tour. He said, "We passed through large villages where the good peasants presented simple bread and salt," which are very important in Russia. At his coronation they spilled the salt. It was part of the ceremony. That was bad omen. He was very superstitious, by the way. Seventeen was his unlucky number. He was terrified of seventeen. There was a huge throng at his inauguration, and a stampede, and lots of people were killed. That was a bad omen, too. Anyway, he said, "All the peasants presented simple bread and salt and all went down immediately on their knees showing such a touching childish joy." He had the image that the Russian people were childish, that they--and his wife insisted on this--loved being whipped. They loved being punished. Since the abolition of the serfdom in 1861, there was lots of mistreatment of peasants by lords, but you could no longer literally torture serfs, so long as he didn't die. Before 1861 if you tortured a serf and he did die or if you just ordered him killed or killed him yourself, you would receive a small fine. But still, there was this idea that the narod, that the people, "good, virtuous, and kindly," will come to their senses and that they will not disobey during the war. They will do what he told them. Until the end, possibly, we don't know this--the idea that they will rise up and take him away from his captors in those final days. They did try. There were attempts, but it wasn't ordinary people. He had these views of orthodoxy, autocracy, aristocracy, etc. It's a romantic view. He preferred Russian foods. Peter the Great liked Russian food, but he also, you'll remember, ripped roasts off tables in London, and drank tons of wine and things like that when he was in Western Europe. He spoke Russian, obviously, very well, but he spoke English with his wife, because English was her language, along with some German. Again, speaking English was part of this kind of aristocratic tradition of speaking other languages by the aristocracy, but not Russian. Again, French and German were--they did speak Russian, but French and German were sort of privileged languages. He had this feeling that he didn't like big cities. He had his retreat on the sea near St. Petersburg or Petrograd. He said that Moscow and St. Petersburg were "two needle dots on the map of our country." Well, in terms of percentages he was certainly correct. It was his idea to rename St. Petersburg to Petrograd, because it was more Russian.

But he believed, and I've already spoken about this a little bit, that the heart of the empire was Moscow, because it was the religious capital of the empire, and that the skyline was dotted with churches and not by government buildings. Part of having a modern army and a modern navy was you had to have a bureaucracy. Petrograd was a bureaucratized city and "not truly Russian in its heart and in its spirit." He didn't spend much time in the famous winter palace, that of the siege in the Russian Revolution. When he went to his provincial resort on the sea, where I've been, but a long time ago, he had a new church built there but in the original Moscow style. Nicholas and Alexandra were raving anti-Semites. That's why it's amazing, this business--didn't they canonize him as a saint or something? I really don't know, but that's horrific. He loved the Black Hundreds who had sparked--and in the pogroms, particularly in Crimea in 1905, and had beaten Jews to death. He thought that they represented the true heart of Russia. His interpretation was that the pogroms were the "pious rage." I think that's Mark's phrase, not his. Here's his, unfortunately I quote, "The Poles and the Yids," that is a slang, horrible, racist, ethnic denunciation of people who happen to be Jewish, "who had agitated and brought about the concessions of 1905." That the revolution of 1905 and until he went to his grave, so to speak, he believed that the Russian Revolution was the work of Jews. Incidentally, because a fair number of the Bolsheviks happen to be Jewish, this played into the Russian Civil War because of the sheer brutality in the Russian Civil War of the "white forces" against the "reds," or the Bolsheviks, was often part of, just sort of an extension of anti-Semitism run wild. Anyway, Nicholas wrote that the deaths of these people, of the Jews in 1905, was justified. "Harm befell not only the Yids, but also Russian agitators, engineers, lawyers, and all other bad people." Anyway, it's very sad. There was lots of complexity built into his being. On one hand he's supposed to be the czar of all the people. He's supposed to be ruthless. He's supposed to be tough, hard, etc., etc. On the other hand, he's dominated by his wife. His wife is constantly urging him in her letters to him to be harsh, demonstrate "the power of your will and your decisiveness." "Show you're the complete autocrat, without whom Russia cannot exist. Ah, my love, when at last will you thump with your hand upon the table and scream at those who act wrongly. They do not fear you enough, but indeed they must, oh my boy. Make one tremble before you. To love you is not enough. They must obey you. Show to all that you are the master and that your will will be obeyed." He signed one letter to his wife "ever your poor little hussy,"--that's an odd choice of words--"with a tiny will." With a tiny will.

She was born in Germany, a princess. These royals, as I've stressed, they're all intermarried. She's the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. She had identity with HesseDarmstadt, the part of Germany in which she was born. And, as I said, although she spoke English at home and with her children, she had been a convert to Russian Orthodoxy. She also feared or resented idleness. She thought it was important to work. She was a nurse for her children. She worked for her son, above all. She worked very, very hard. She wanted to keep her daughters "from foolish gossip" and away from being "idle and listless." She was fanatically religious. She went to church everyday, and she was intolerant of those people who did not. Again, this turns them towards Rasputin. Again, Rasputin did not make, by being who he was, the Russian Revolution. It's a popular revolution. But still, he's there lurking in the shadows. She said, "God has given Rasputin more insight, wisdom, and enlightenment than all of the czar's advisors." At home, she reinforces the idea that any kind of constitutional compromise was dangerous. She believed until the end that St. Petersburg, Petrograd, was a rotten town, not Russian at all. As for the Black Hundreds, who had murdered all the Jews, they represented "the healthy, right-thinking Russians." "The Russian people loved to be whipped," she said. She believed it was in the Slavic nature. They use over and over the word "childish" in describing other Russian people. The progressive block, which I sent around on the website, she believed that the existence of the progressive block, which wouldn't have been really possible had it not been for World War I. World War I gives opportunity to Russian dissidents to get together in ways that they couldn't have otherwise. It makes possible the creation and operation of voluntary associations that are bringing people together to try to send food and letters to the front, to get news from the front that are not military secrets. These inevitably began to imagine a world without the czar. There were people in 1905 who could imagine a world without the czar. Again, there are lots of people who are thinking about the post-war world and who imagine or are beginning plan for a reformed czarism. It's very hard to say how many people could comprehend the idea that Russia would not have a czar. Obviously, the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks did feel that way. All of these dissident groups want change, but only the liberals and particularly the Kadets, whom you can read about, want the czardom, the autocracy to continue. But until the very end, Nicholas is determined to defend the autocracy, trying to transfer power to his brother when the Revolution comes. Mikhail, who would be the regent for Alexi. Then, when told by his son's physician, and imagine this, that his son would not recover, he tried to leave the

autocracy in the hands forever of his brother, Mikhail. In fact, he abdicated the next day. He really wrote only, "All around me is treachery, cowards, and deceit." What were they going to do with him? What do you do with the czar of all the Russians, and Alexandra, and their children? Predictably enough, the liberals and the Kadets want to have them protected. The Socialists basically want him to go on trial, that is the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks. But for a couple days they don't do anything at all. They've got other things going on. They've got the war. I won't discuss the attitude of the Provisional Government to the war, and the kinds of pressures from the Allies, of course, for them to keep the war going. That is handled in the textbook. There are more demands from the public and from the soviets, in particular, to arrest him. So, the provisional government wants to protect them. They finally order them confined to the resort, which is called Tsarskoe Selo, but the name doesn't matter. Nicholas himself, he wants to go to Britain. One day he wanted to live out the rest of his life with his family in Crimea. Does the British government want the czar of all the Russian people to arrive in London? Not exactly. It might complicate the war effort. Labor will have no part of it at all. You're dealing with a coalition in the war. You can't have the czar. You're not going to be coming in a 747 or something, but you can't have him coming up the river in the Thames. How are you going to get him there in the first place? That simply is not practical. The liberals didn't want the czar there either. There were constantly rumors that the czar was going to be allowed to leave. There's lots of protests about that. Kerensky says that the revolution should show its moral worth by seeing that no harm came to the royal family. By the way, just as an aside, Kerensky lived a very, very long life. At the end of his life, he taught this course at Stanford University. There's a story that's probably apocryphal. This is in very contentious times in American politics in the late 1960s. I can vaguely remember those days. A student, not realizing it was Kerensky, asked a question saying, "How could the provisional government be so stupid in their conduct of those operations?" And this clueless person had no idea that this was Kerensky, who was an historian and was trained as an historian. He died shortly thereafter. But that is really amazing to think. Of course, Lenin dies in 1924 or 1925, but Kerensky went on and on. So, what they do, they're in the resort, their little mini palace. They're allowed to take walks. They could talk on the telephone, but only in Russian and only in the presence of a guard who spoke Russian. They could not speak German and they could not speak English. They separated the family for a while, fearful of the influence of Alexandra on Nicholas. Again, this is rather like the attitude that people had toward Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. People

thought that the influence of Marie Antoinette was prenant, was overwhelming, on Louis XVI. Anyway, then they were put back together and they didn't have much to do. They gardened. They taught the children, which they always had done. They wrote letters. They went to church. They complained that the soldiers were more and more disrespectful. They were noisy. They were slovenly in their dress, their crushed caps were set awry on huge mops of unkempt hair. Their coats were half-buttoned and their nonchalant manner of performing their military duties was a constant irritation. They mocked them. They knocked on the door. "Who's there?" The answer would come, "The czar of all the Russians." A Latvian guard, "a mere commoner," outside would be laughing uproariously. Once the czar was pedaling his bike and he goes by a guard who has a bayonet, and the guy sticks his bayonet into the spokes of the wheel. The czar of all the Russians went tumbling down and skinned his knees. But yet there were rumors of how well they were eating when nobody else was eating. When the July Days mini-attempt at revolution comes, for their own safety Kerensky says they have to be moved. So, they decided on Siberia, almost inevitably, to a town called Tobolsk, where they would presumably be safe and they were moved on August 1, 1917, with their windows covered up for most of the trip. Like Lenin, when he comes back, is brought back by Germany to encourage the Russians to get out of the war, he goes on the famous sealed train, so people can't see that it is Lenin, because people knew what he looked like. The same thing, the czar of all the people is not going to be seen by the masses, because what if they try to stop the train and pull them off that? Ironically, they passed by Rasputin's home village, and indeed his house, as a steamboat took them via two rivers to this town of Tobolsk, where I have never been. This frightened them, especially Nicholas, because he is so superstitious. The salt falling, the stampede, the number seventeen, and all of this. When they're pulled by the house, on the steamboat, of the dead Rasputin, his trusted advisor, it is a bad omen. So, they could go to church when they arrived. They played cards. They performed plays, en famille, which they did a lot. But the counterrevolution was a very real threat. The Americans, and the British, and the French, after the Bolshevik revolution--one reason Stalin was so paranoid, he was clinically paranoid, just a complete dangerous crackpot, but they had a lot to be paranoid about, because the Americans, and the British, and the French kept trying to undo the Russian Revolution. Anyway, they were photographed and they had ID cards. Can you imagine the czar and the czarina having ID cards, like your Yale ID cards? They start seeing obscene graffiti written, new guards come that had even less respect for them than the other

people. There were serious attempts to kidnap them and to get rid of them. There was one in which czarists were supposed to be hidden under the altar of the church when they were in the service. This, again, is a throwback to the revolution. It was like in the French Revolution, where there is a massacre that starts at the Festival of the Federation when people are hidden under the church. So, there are articles in the newspapers calling for the surveillance of Nicholas "The Bloody Romanov," and calls for him to be put on trial. The arrival of a certain Vasili Yakovlev, a name you don't have to remember, obviously, sent by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet. He was a longtime revolutionary, rumored subsequently to have been an agent of the Germans, which is preposterous. Lenin was rumored to have been an agent of the Germans, by his enemies, because of the way he got back to Russia after the initial revolutions. He was the son of a peasant. He had that kind of curriculum vitae that lots of folks, including Stalin, had. He had participated in armed holdups to raise money for revolution and became a Bolshevik. He transferred the czar and family to a much smaller place. The czar and his wife believed, naively, that they were going to be taken to Moscow because the provisional government--originally, before the provisional government is ended--wants Nicholas to sign the eventual peace treaty with the Germans. So, this Yakovlev was ordered to take his "baggage," as they called it, that is the royal family, to this small town in the Ural mountains. But the Ural mountain Bolsheviks were harder to control. Remember, the Russian Revolution, both the first one and the second, have been aptly described as a revolution by telegraph. The vast reaches of the Russian Empire are so absolutely enormous that in many cases it was weeks, and in a few places months, before any revolutionary commissar arrived to sort of inform people what's going on. So, lots of these Bolsheviks were sort of freelancers, and, for a party that was extremely hierarchically controlled from the top down, there was very little control over the Ural Bolsheviks. Nicholas had some trepidation about that, because he wrote that "there was a mood that was rather harsh" against him. Conditions were worse. They used to like to photograph birds and things like that in bushes. Their equipment was taken away from them. They could no longer control their own money. The guards couldn't talk to them at all, so they could only talk to each other. Some of the guards were just awful to them. There were plans afoot to put them on trial, a kind of show trial, but there was also this big possibility discussed that they might simply be killed. Trotsky asked that they be put on trial, so that the corruption and abuses of the autocracy could be revealed. The context is that there are large, massive armies being organized, the White

Armies. Because foreign intervention was already underway, it's conceivable, one could imagine why there was a national current within the Bolsheviks, but local in particular, and that's what would count, that they should be executed. It's possible that a telegram came from Moscow ordering that they be executed, or simply that it was the Ural Bolsheviks--in the Ural mountain region--acting on their own. Recently, the archives have been opened up only in the last ten or fifteen years, and the people that have looked think that is mostly the case. In any case, the order came in July 1918, that there be a trial. If that was not deemed possible, they should be shot. A bloody execution on the night of, early morning really, of July 16-17, that number again. They actually died on the 17th of July 1918 in a horrific massacre with machine guns and pistols, a bloodbath in the basement of a house. Almost immediately there were stories that Alexandra and her daughters had been seen taking a train away from there. Way into the 1980s the Russian community in Paris tended to settle around the Boulevard Montparnasse, where there is still a very good Russian restaurant that is there. There is a particular caf called the Coupole on boulevard Montparnasse where sort of the Russian migr wealthy people went. There were periodically women turning up who claimed to be the daughter, and then later, as the time passed, the granddaughter of the czar. It was only after what was left of the bodies, or the bones, them dry bones, were discovered in 1976, and forensic experts in 1991 were able to work with the DNA, that the victims have all been accounted for. None of them escaped. The others were in that long Russian tradition of false czars or false czarinas, the kind their loyalty to whom in the eighteenth century generated so many uprisings. What can one say? He's been canonized, this vicious, murderous, anti-Semite, by the Russian Orthodox Church. But that's not my church. It's not for me to say that. I don't know. Yes I do. Anyway, tragic martyrdom? Were they heroic people, or simply human beings who were mowed down in a revolution that didn't start out as a bloody revolution but became a very, very bloody civil war? Was it the first signposts of Soviet totalitarianism? No. It wasn't that. Was it bloody vengeance for past misdeeds in the pursuit of justice? It depends on your viewpoint. I happen to believe the latter. See you on Wednesday. Thank you.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 20 Transcript November 12, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today I'm going to do a fairly impossible task, which is to talk mostly about Eastern Europe in the interwar period. I sent around a rather lengthy list of terms, so I don't have to write it on the board and you can't see it anyway. I'll work from that, so it'll help you understand. But the big points are clear, and the maps will help you as well. Just a couple things at the beginning, which are perfectly obvious. In 1914, few people could have imagined that they would sweep away four empires, etc., etc. and take the lives of millions of people. In 1918 and 1919 there was the Great Illusion. The Great Illusion was held by Wilson and lots of other people, that wars were started by evil people in high places, which may often be the case. But the problems left by the Treaty of Versailles were basically insoluble. The 1920s and 1930s are basically a continuation of the war. You can look at the entire period from 1914 to 1945 as a thirty years' war. Europe was in depression basically the entire time between the wars, as we'll see when I talk about Eastern Europe and East Central Europe. That has a lot to do with the chronic

instability of the period. Western Europe and the United States were really not in depression between 1924 and 1929. Then the thunder comes in 1929. The United States doesn't get out of the Depression until basically World War II. The war economy helps them do that. But Eastern Europe, in the places where the instability and the lack of parliamentary traditions was so important, was in agricultural depression the entire time. By 1939 in Central and Eastern Europe, only one state, Czechoslovakia, remains a parliamentary regime. In all of the others, the Eastern Europe of little dictators, and fascist parties, and rightwing agrarian populist parties--some of them didn't start out rightwing-poisoned the political atmosphere. The Treaty of Versailles, when they meet and these delegations meet--including the former president of Yale, the future president of Yale then, Charles Seymour, was in the American delegation there--they were convinced that they could put an end to all wars. They would get Germany to sign on the dotted line saying, "We started it all." As I'll argue next week, and it's perfectly clear, that was a catastrophic mistake. Germany arguably had a greater role in starting the war than the other places, but this guaranteed the perpetual hostility of an ever increasing number of rightwing parties, of which the most vicious and the most successful would be the Nazis, opposed the very existence of the Weimar Republic and became, as I'll explain a minute, a revisionist state. A revisionist state is one that wanted to revise the Treaty of Versailles, because people of their dominant ethnic group had ended up on the wrong side of the frontier. If you had fought a war that was based upon national claims in 1914, in which aggressive nationalism was one of the root causes of the war, the successor states that are created out of these collapsed empires find themselves facing the reality that you could get all the maps you wanted, and you could get all the cartographers that you wanted, and geographers, and bring them all to Versailles, and bring them all to the French suburbs, Trianon, and Svres, and Neuilly, and the others, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, that became named after the treaties with the individual powers. But you couldn't draw lines around national groups that were going to incorporate everybody within the country of their choice. You couldn't do it. That leaves a permanent factor for instability. If you don't believe me, look at the Balkans in the 1990s, which were the worst atrocities since the death camps in World War II, in which ethnic cleansing and rape as a means of waging war became a reality again, and in which those old hatreds had never been extinguished. So, the Great Illusion was that there wouldn't be anymore wars. In the case of Germany, as we'll see, the troops who were demobilized, who came back, they kept drilling in their basements, the Freikorps, the Free Corps in Germany. Lots of people among them, just

one of millions, the young Adolf Hitler--the view that they held was that the problem wasn't to have fought the war in the first place, which was a Wilsonian view of the war, but the problem was not to have won the war. The problem is, how do you explain to home that you've lost the war when your troops are far, far inside Germany? I'm getting ahead of my story, but it's just such a complicated subject, all this. It's a little hard not to. The other problem was, if you're punishing losers in World War I, you're often punishing them in a way that seems to violate the very principle that you hope to espouse of each people, more or less their own country. The powers that become the revisionist powers, almost all were on the losing side. They're the ones that, by the very principles espoused at Versailles, that basically just simply get screwed. As the Hungarians put it, "No, no, never." That was their response, "No, no, never." These powers, of which the most dangerous, ultimately, is Germany, are far more powerful in defeat than France is in victory, basically vow to get even. Not the Weimar Republic, but those people who wanted to destroy the republic. Then Eastern Europe will be full of little Hitlers, little racist dictators who are also convinced that "in the next one, we'll get it back." "We'll get it all back and we'll bring it back with a percentage of interest as well." Increasingly, a point that I'd better make in a while, they begin to look at, in the Europe of extremes, Germany as a very compelling model. The Eastern European states that had certainly reasons to increasingly fear Germany, they begin to see Germany as a rather successful model. The Europe of the extremes, as Eric Hobsbawm has called it, is basically, if you exclude the Soviet Union, which is another kind of totalitarian state, and if you exclude the role of the Communist parties as a destabilizing force in many of these countries, is a Europe of fascism. They just keep right on marching, because fascists are better at describing how they will take power--marching, violence--and whom they hate, than what they will construct afterward. What they will construct afterward in all of these places will be a totalitarian, fascist state that is based upon the principle of totally over-the-top, aggressive nationalism and anti-whatever the minorities are, particularly the Jews. Anti-Semitism becomes an important part of all of this. So, the guys with the maps, and the pencils, and trying to draw the little squiggly lines--it doesn't really work out very well. Wilson comes back in utter defeat and the American congress doesn't approve the Treaty of Versailles anyway, and America enters, as you know, a period of isolationism, at least until the next time around. That was a rather lengthy introduction to what I was going to talk about.

Let's try to be more specific now. What are the big-time revisionist states? First, let me just start out with one that didn't lose, but is one in which, as you'll see when you read the chapter, where fascism is first saluted and then takes power. That is Italy. Italy wins. They're open to offers, open to the highest bidder, and they join in 1915 because the Allies can promise them more. They promise them part of the Tyrol between Austria and Italy, and they promise them much of the Dalmatian Coast. Italy went to war for that reason, but also because in a country in which a sense of national unity basically didn't exist, there was a strong feeling that war will make Italians out of all these different people. That's not real good reason to go to war, but they do go to war. Of course, they were being systematically denigrated by the other Allied leaders for woeful aspects of their army, which also took huge losses fighting the Austro-Hungarian forces. So, when they come to Versailles, Orlando, who is their representative, he's a junior partner in this. They don't pay a lot of attention to him. Wilson says, "You can't give them the Tyrol, because they don't have Italian majorities there and they certainly don't have Italian majorities in the Dalmatian Coast," which is populated by, logically enough, by Croats. So, they don't get what they want. Mussolini, who began his career as a socialist, he was the editor of Avanti!, "Forward," which was the socialist paper, he becomes one of the originators of fascism, and he appeared, as you'll see in the book, on the cover of Time magazine eight times. He's the guy that got the railroads to run on time in Italy, but only the ones to the ski resorts. Anyway, I don't have time to talk about him now. So, they're kind of a revisionist power. Mussolini's discourse about how he's going to turn the Mediterranean into an Italian lake, revive the Roman Empire, and all that has to be seen in that context. Italy was not "a loser" in World War I, but rather an aggrieved winner. I guess that's a good way of putting it. The revisionist powers are those that lost. Revisionist powers, of course, no one was more revisionist than Germany, and the German Empire is destroyed. Germany, again it's hard to summarize all of this, but Germany from the very beginning says, "If you're going to argue that national ethnic groups and where they live should determine the drawing of boundaries, then what the Allies did to Germany seemed extremely unfair," and not only to the far right in Germany. This leaves aside the question that I'll come to next week. John Maynard Keynes, who was a brilliant, brilliant guy, he's the one who saw that this is recipe for disaster, the Treaty of Versailles. He's the one who said, "This is just a truce. It's not the end of the war. If you make Germany pay for the whole war, based on that they've signed the war guilt clause, you're going to so destabilize this country that eventually the right will take over." That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened.

From the point of view of Germany, the most egregious loss that they suffered was the Polish Corridor. If you go to Gdansk, which is a wonderful city, which was destroyed during the war like most every city in Poland except for Krakow, which really got lucky. I can remember going to Warsaw, au temps des camarades, when it was still into the communist regime, when I was a kid. You could see where there once had been boulevards. The whole place was just absolutely razed. Krakow was very lucky because it survived. What they do is Gdansk gets rebuilt. Gdansk was a German city. The Polish population was extremely small. You may know of Gdansk because that's where Solidarity began in 1979 and 1980. There's an important port there, and that's where Lech Walesa got his start, and the whole Solidarity movement, including some of my friends, historians, who were young printers for Solidarity in those days. As I've said a couple of times, I go to Poland all the time, in the last couple of years five times or something like that. Anyway, Gdansk, from the point of view of the Germans, was German. The vast majority of the population was German. What the Germans called "the Polish Corridor" divided the rest of Germany from Pomerania in East Prussia. It was resented by the Germans because there was a strong German population that remained. Of course the Poles, when they look at Gdansk, they look back to when Gdansk was an important port then, too, in the PolishLithuanian commonwealth. In fact, Poles are quite insistent. Polish historians--and the whole concept of sovereignty that emerged in the Netherlands and in England in early-modern times was also being constructed in and around Gdansk. The other big wound for the Germans was Czechoslovakia. The second largest ethnic group in the newly one of the successor states, along with Poland and Yugoslavia, and I have the statistics in what I sent around to you, the first were Czechs at about fifty percent. Germans, if I remember correctly, were twenty-three percent, and Slovaks were sixteen percent. The others are other minorities. They're Ukrainians, and Poles, and all sorts of things. The majority of Germans were concentrated in Prague, though there weren't as many of them as before. Above all, the whole region of Bohemia and in that region called Sudetenland, the Sudetenland Germans. When the allies capitulate to Hitler's demands that that part of Czechoslovakia--then of course he launched the whole thing--be passed into Germany. One of the reasons that they appease is they said, "Maybe he's got a point. In 1918, we couldn't really put the people where they were supposed to be. There are German majorities in a good percentage of Bohemia, within Czechoslovakia. Maybe he's got a point." That was an excuse. That was the rationale for appeasing him, but at a time when he might have been stopped. His generals were just scared to death that the Allies were going to fight them, because they weren't ready for war.

Germany is, above all, the big revisionist power. More about this when we talk about Adolf Hitler next week. The other big one--I can't find it but it's in there--is Hungary. Hungary loses--I've got to remember these statistics. I might have put it around. I think I can remember them. They lose twenty-five percent of the Hungarian population to other states. They lose about between a half and two-thirds, I should remember but I don't, of the land of the old Hungarian domains when they were in Austria-Hungary, when they were, supposedly after 1867, the equal partner of Austria. They lose the greatest percentage of that Hungarian population to Romania. The tensions between the Romanians and the Hungarians were extremely great. The linguistic differences are enormous, because Hungarian is such a difficult language. It's an isolated language. I have a friend who retired here many years ago from Russian and East European languages and literatures who knows eighteen languages. He knows mostly every Central European language. I said, "Do you know Hungarian?" He said, "No, it's too hard." That accentuates this isolation from the Romanians. Again, in 1989 the great groundswell against Ceausescu and his horrendous wife, the dictators in Romania, began with Hungarian dissidents whose families had been generations since World War I stuck, from their point of view, in Romania. When you're trying to look at each of these countries and trying to figure out why does some rightwing maggot, some rightwing dictator, take power? It's because, as in the case of Adolf Hitler, if you say the same thing over and over and over again, pretty soon you get people to believe you. Admiral Horthy, who was an admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he becomes an extraordinarily vicious dictator and egregious collaborator during World War II, sort of an admiring junior partner of Hitler and the Nazis, and the frenetic, aggressive Hungarian nationalism. You can go to Budapest, go along the Danube River in Budapest and see where they've made a sad monument out of the shoes of Jews who were shot or just simply pushed into the swirling waters of the Danube by the Hungarian fascists in 1944. I'm not saying Hungarians as a people, obviously not. I have Hungarian friends and I love Hungary. Budapest is my third favorite city. But the damages done by revisionist claims in Hungary were simply amazing. Of all of the--after the Germans, arguably even more than Germans, they had the most to be aggrieved about, because of losing so much of their country awarded--because they had lost-to other places. Now, the case of Austria, also. If you go to Vienna, it's such a wonderful, huge, musical place full of baroque, baroque, baroque. It's really a great city. You think, "Oh, this is an enormous city for such a little country." What happens when the Austrian-Hungarian Empire is dismembered, Austria becomes a small and overwhelmingly German-speaking state. There

are, comparatively, very few ethnic minorities living in what became Austria after World War I. It's an imperial city. It's an imperial city not reduced in size, but reduced in importance. So, Hungary has huge reasons to be extraordinarily angry by the whole thing. Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia loses some land that they wish that they would have gotten, but again, in Yugoslavia you have this tremendous ethnic complexity. In a way, the successor state of Yugoslavia--maybe some of you have or will take Ivo Banac's course. He's a great Balkan historian. The ethnic complexity, of course, is sort of a mini version of the AustrianHungarian Empire, where Serbs were something like forty percent of the population of Yugoslavia between the wars. That would be really about the percentage until the whole thing collapses in the early 1990s. The Croats were the next largest percentage, followed by Slovenes, who were the wealthiest region and remained that until the end. The standard of living in Slovenia in the 1980s was about that of Italy, where if you went far, far down to Kosovo, where I've been, about where so much has been going on, and which now has been proclaimed independent, it was absolutely impoverished. So, the ethnic complexity is, in itself, going to be a factor for destabilization. What about Poland? Poland had not been independent since 1795, since the Third Partition. You had, as I've already discussed in other contexts, you've got Polish intellectuals. You've got political militants in the 1830s and again in the 1860s who don't want to be part of congress Russia. They don't want to be congress Poland. They don't want to be part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. They don't want to be part of Prussia. They want and dream of the independent Poland. They get their independence in 1918, immediately. But the complexity is enormous there. You've already got these ethnic minorities who are there. The Germans are there. You've got huge numbers of Ukrainians. In fact, in Eastern Poland the cities like Zamosc, where Rosa Luxemburg was born, which is a beautiful city, these are Polish cities, but the vast majority of the rural population are Ukrainian. They are Ukrainian. This was a force of "instability." They will be killing each other off during World War II. The other minority is the Jews. How many Jews were there in Poland in 1918-1919? Poland was considered to be, before Israel, Poland was really the cultural heart of Judaism. There are three million Jews living in Poland. In the east, mostly Orthodox and Labavitcher. By the way, just as an aside but it's a telling aside. When I was in Zamosc we were taken to a synagogue which had been turned into a place where high school students and middle school students exhibited their paintings. I asked the guide, who was taking these academics around, and press editors, and all this stuff. I said, "Look, what was the population of Zamosc in 1939?" He said, "The population of

Zamosc in 1939 was 39,000." I said, "How many Jews were living in Zamosc who had been coming to this synagogue in 1939?" He said, "12,000." I said, "How many Jews live in Zamosc now?" "Zero. Zero." The others, if they were lucky enough not to have been killed in the death camps--and I just reviewed a book for the Globe about the ghetto in Lodz, they were likely to get out. Not to jump ahead, but the number of Jews who survived out of three million was about 300,000 Polish Jews who, I think, came back to Poland after the war or who had managed somehow to survive. . The point of this is that these ethnic tensions, particularly in a part of Europe where antiSemitism had been just replete. It's a Thirty Years' War. How can you not leap ahead into World War II? Some of the massacres of Jews, for example, during this horrible period were done by Ukrainians in Ukraine, Lithuanians in Lithuania. Many of you have seen just horrific pictures. I can't remember. We have this awful picture that used to be in the first edition--I don't even know if it's in the second edition--who were beaten to death. A former colleague here whom I don't really know, Jan Gross, wrote an important book called Neighbors about how Jews and Poles who lived in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s lived very peacefully in one village, and how, without apparent instigation from the Nazis who would have been happy to kill them all and planned to kill them all, just simply one day started killing them all. They shot them all dead, beat them to death, put them in barns and burned the barns. These tensions, which are aggressive nationalism. I go to Poland all the time. It's amazing. There still is this undercurrent of anti-Semitism. I hope, since this is being filmed, I sometimes forget, they may get letters, but it's really incredible. I was being interviewed on Polish TV with this other guy and it was a pleasure to denounce our president. Anyway, I don't speak Polish. Another time we were all being interviewed and they said, this guy said, "What do you think of the Jew problem in Poland?" I was about to kill him. I shouldn't say that, but take him out. Not really, but I was pretty mad. Then this woman who was there, who represents the Jewish community, such as it remains, in Israel, she said, "No, no, no. It's a question of language." But when we went to one of the Polish museums, which is the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising--they don't have a Museum of the Ghetto Uprising--we had to complain about how they depicted Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not to dump on Polish--well, it is to dump on Polish anti-Semitism, but not as Poland as a state. These tensions are exacerbated between the wars. If you've got these frenetic right wing leaders who are aggressive nationalists in all of these places, who are they denouncing? They're denouncing what? The Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties in conjunction with

it. Who? Romanians, if they are Hungarians, etc., etc. You pick the nationality, and Jews most anywhere. It was there. These folks are often--like Horthy, they are preaching to the converted. They're preaching to the converted. It's an obvious, sad story. In these revisionist powers, all this stuff is going on. I know less about and don't have much time to talk about Bulgaria, which lost, but you have these same kind of tensions. Turkey was just completely--that's arguably the harshest treaty, that with Turkey. They lose most of what's left, really in the Middle East, of Turkey. This gets transformed into mandates under British and French control. As a losing power, they lose land to their bitter archenemy, Greece. Then this enormous exchange of populations begins, forced exchange of populations, as followed by voluntary exchange between Turkey and Greece. But the case of Turkey is special because Attaturk, whom you can read about, becomes the visionary president of a new Turkey, of a secularized Turkey, and does not go the way, for all occasional stridency, of this sort of Europe of little dictators, the Eastern and Central Europe of little dictators. Even as I said--where are we? I kind of left my lecture behind, but that's all right. I'm doing the themes that we should be doing anyway. You can read about the rest. Even in Czechoslovakia--one can say, "There was a democracy that really truly functioned." But there are enormous tensions in Czechoslovakia as well. You've got your Czechs. Your Czechs are the dominant population in Czechoslovakia, but they are basically Protestant, mostly Protestant. The Czech part or what would become the Czech Republic is, as you already know, largely Bohemia, or much of it is Bohemia. There's Moravia also, which is poorer, but it is very industrial. It is much more prosperous. Slovakia is almost entirely Catholic and much more rural. It's basically a peasant society in which the Catholic Church, and particularly the very rightwing aspects of the Catholic Church, as opposed to the case of Poland, where the Catholic Church has basically been a force for progress, except for antiSemitic currents in some parts of the clergy. It's not surprising that in World War II, one of the most horrendous collaborators and people cheering on the guards of the Jews as they're packing them onto the trains to be taken away and killed was a priest. Again, I'm not dissing the Catholic Church. I was raised at a Jesuit high school. But there were tensions within Czechoslovakia also. Even in the triumphant case, triumphant until the German legions start marching in and start killing Jews again there. Not again, because there really hadn't been pogroms and stuff like that there. Even there it's the complexity of the whole thing that is simply amazing. But the big point, it's not big news, but the big point is that ethnic contentions contested borders. Diplomatic problems caused by or inherent in

having these new states--Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia--will continue to be very important in a place that had virtually no parliamentary traditions. There were no democratic traditions, even in a country like Poland, which had been divided up between these three empires. So, it's pretty darn hard to suddenly say, "Now we are a republic," and try to make that work. It's very, very difficult. Indeed, there's a mistake in that book, or at least my Polish friends tell me it's a mistake. I have described Pilsudski, whose parents and who himself thought he was Lithuanian at the beginning, but I already talked about that. He's described as being rightwing. He began his career as being kind of leftwing. But he's the first to destroy the parliamentary regime. He does that in 1926. Pilsudski's a great hero in Poland, still. I was taken on almost a forced march to see his tomb. Why? Because he, in the miracle of the Vistula River, the Vistula is this monumentally important river in Poland, that Trotsky's Red Army is moving toward Warsaw and imagining that they're going to move toward Berlin, and assist the revolution in Germany. They're turned back in the suburbs of Warsaw. The miracle of the Vistula by Pilsudski. This gives him a kind of a prestige and identification with the Polish state that is obviously important. So, in 1926 he says, "Look, this is impossible." He puts an end to the parliamentary regime, at least in reality. It's in 1929 or 1930, he arrests the progressive opposition. He behaves like these other dictators, except he's not putting people against the wall, or having them beaten to death by iron guards, and all these groups. That's one of the first to go. Compounding all of this is again, to go back to what I said at the beginning, East Central Europe--incidentally, the Poles no longer want to see themselves described as Eastern Europe. Then it was East Central Europe. They say, "You should go through your book and take out all references to Eastern Europe with regard to Poland. We are Central Europe." That's how they see themselves. Again, it's impossible to overestimate the hatred and still the fear of Russia. That's why they had this ridiculous idea of having American bases in Poland, which is just a crazy idea. Anyway, that's just my personal opinion, in parentheses. Compounding all of this is that you've got a peasant society. All of these are peasant societies. The vast majority of the population are peasants. I think it's about seventy-five percent in Poland. In Poland, Warsaw is already very big. Krakow is very, very big. I keep talking about Poland, because that's the one I know the best. Hungary would be less because Budapest is such a large city. Also, lots of the rural parts of Hungary have been amputated. It's a peasant society. What brings, and this is the argument of my good friend, Kim Snyder, what brings peasants into politics in the 1920s is one thing, besides hating the people not of the same ethnic group with them, depending on the place, and maybe being anti-Semitic because of the

tradition of rural money lenders and all of this who happen to be Jewish, and Jewish storekeepers in the peasant perception of the world, is the hope of land reform, of land reform. Of maybe breaking up the big estates, but at a minimum helping out poor rural people. What happens is that in the 1920s and the 1930s is that poor rural people are being screwed, to put it a bit crudely, by what? By the agricultural depression. The price of agricultural products, which is the economy, is the economy, plunges to practically nothing, and they can't get by. One of the factors for the rise of fascism in all of its guises--it's called fascism in Italy; it's called National Socialism in Germany; in France, a part of the extreme right called it francisme, in Spain--he's not really a fascist, Franco's a rightwing authoritarian. He's still a murderer, but he's a rightwing authoritarian, but he's still a murderer, period--is the economic situation. I'll make this clear when I talk about Germany. That's what drives the middle class, which is the first class to embrace Hitler. It's the big crisis of the great inflation in the early 1920s. What helps drive peasants in all these countries, the ones who become politicized and finally say, "What did parliamentary regime bring me and my family? Not much. We still can't get by." So, there we go. "These little dictator guys thundering away, they seem to be telling it like it is." It's the Jews, or it's the Bulgarians, or it's the Romanians, or it's the Hungarians, or it's the Serbs, or it's the Muslims. It's the Greeks. It's the Turks. You name it. You fill in the national group. It's a Europe of hatred. It's a Europe of fear, an absorbed, integrated fear. I suppose that's kind of a silly way of putting it, but not that bad after all. When they look around, what do they see? First, these countries are frightened. These powers, the new states ally. They say, "We're going to have to lie together," and some of them join up with France, and that won't do them much good in 1939. But there is this model that seems to be working in Germany. The French, what they do in this inflation in the 1920s and 1930s, they were loaning money everywhere before. They pulled in the reins. They bring in the credit. Nazi Germany, particularly after it is Nazi Germany, after January 1933, they provide this sort of model. They say, "We'll help you out. We'll help you out. The other countries are not buying your products. We'll buy even more of them. We'll loan you money. We'll organize this." It seems to be an orderly society. More about that. It's not just a society of coercion, without jumping ahead. Hitler seems to be providing things to the German people that they want. Work, the armaments factories are preparing for war. Order, they're arresting petty criminals. I'll talk more about that. And racial purity. They begin thinking, "Hey, that's a good thing. It's the fault of the Jews and the Poles. It's the fault of the Poles."

When they invade Poland, I don't emphasize this as much as I should have in your book, but they begin right away carrying out genocide. They begin killing the Polish intelligentsia right away, and they kill the Polish generals right away. The Russians are doing the same thing, actually, the Soviets further on. It's a permanent source of instability, this agrarian depression, this economic depression. What it does, it's a factor for further destabilization. Talk about parliamentary regimes comes pretty cheap, but they disappear one after another. And in each and every case, with the fascists and variants, in each and every case the discourse is, "We, the real people of this place, do not want these other people here. We don't want them here." Of course, not all of these people carried it to the outcome of the Nazis, or of the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians who just started beating Jews to death along the way. But it wasn't just the Western states that had great instability. The willingness, indeed the eagerness of people like Horthy to collaborate with Hitler openly, enthusiastically, all the way through until the bitter end is, in part, a result of--these rightwing movements become mass movements in these places, as they did in Germany. And as they did in eight percent of the population of the Netherlands votes for a guy called Musser, who's their little fascist guy, or in Belgium, which is a town of shopkeepers. They support their guy who just died about ten years ago, Degrelle, who died on the Costa Brava. They all seem to die on the Costa Brava. They all basically get away with it and end up going to Spain, and a lot of them protected by the Franco regime. They all seem to croak on the Costa Brava. Anyway, I got away from the text but it doesn't matter. I think I made my points anyway. The points are that Europe is in a period of instability. That with the exception of the big powers in the West between 1924 and 1929, all these places are in depression and that the sweeping away of parliamentary regimes in places that had virtually no parliamentary traditions at all was not all that surprising. It was compounded by the outcome of World War I. Again, as I said before at least twice, the demons of the twentieth century emerged from the war. Nowhere more tellingly, more appallingly, with greater costs, with greater devastation, with humanity sinking to an all-time low, than that in Nazi Germany. That's what I'm going to talk about next Wednesday. Monday, another cheerful topic--Stalinism. We will go from there. Have a wonderful weekend. I'll see you.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 21 Transcript November 17, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Today I want to talk about Stalinism, and, in doing so--fifteen years ago, lots of what we now know about the Soviet Union through its entire history we didn't know, because the archives weren't open. When the Soviet Union collapsed, fell apart, disintegrated in the early 1990s, gradually lots of the archives were opened. What I have to say today--I don't work in the Soviet Union--draws upon the work of Peter Holquist. He used to teach at Cornell and now teaches at Princeton, and more recent work on Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Let me just lay out the overview at the beginning. I sent around this morning--I didn't get home until real late last night, so I sent along at about 12:30 in the morning various terms, but I forgot a couple--democratic centralism, right opposition, and Bukharin--but this stuff is all in the book. I hope you're able to get that. I'll do the same for next time. The question remains: did Lenin inevitably lead to Stalin? That's a hard one. I guess basically the structure of what morphed into the Soviet regime was set, the way that the Bolshevik

party operated, even before taking power. The fundamental concept was democratic centralism. That is the way that the Soviet state became organized as a top-down way of making decisions and sending out relevant communication. In principle, it was supposed to involve debate at the highest levels. Then, once decisions were taken, then they were communicated through the Communist Party. But, of course, the sheer paranoia of Stalin--he was, as you know, a clinical paranoid. His paranoia led to the deaths of millions of people. Debate itself became, as a concept under Stalinism, identified with anti-Soviet behavior. Essentially, what had begun as a popular revolution on behalf of working people--also, to an extent, on behalf of nationalities--became the dictatorship not of the proletariat, not of the proletariat but of the Communist Party, of the Bolshevik Party transformed into the Communist Party and the dictatorship of Stalin. Of course, as his paranoia increased the purges followed. The big show trials, some of which where people, Western communists went in, and sat and listened to hear people confess to having been in cahoots with Nazis, or with English royalists, or whomever, and confess to things that they certainly had never done not long before their execution. One of the points to be made today is, following Peter Holquist, that the structure of the Stalinist terror--there were antecedents that one could see in the civil war, and in the period of Lenin's domination in the early years of the Soviet Union. But very early on, the people who imagined that nationalities would have autonomy, those hopes were destroyed quite quickly. Stalin, he had been minister, or whatever they called the Commissar of Nationalities. The idea that workers' self-management, self-control, control of the means of production, would be implemented in this new brave world was shattered rather quickly with strikes and protests by workers, smashed by the police, by the Soviet state. The illusion would be perpetuated in the 1920s, and even in the 1930s, that this was a true workers' paradise, and that everything was groovy. But the talk was always about the "radiant future." Radiant was a word that they used a lot. I'll talk more about this in a while. The future would be radiant. It would be glorious. But the sacrifices had to be made now, and they had to be made now to protect the revolution against the Americans, against the French, and against the British, and the powers of capitalism, etc., etc. Of course, as you all know, it never came to be. That's the tragedy of the Russian Revolution. Well, more about this in a while. First of all, as backdrop to all of this, because of the civil war, and because of famine conditions, and because of just enormous economic hardship, trying to have a state--it was not clear how this could possibly be done. You've got a country with all these nationalities, which is basically still essentially a country of peasants, despite the industrial work in the Ural

mountains, and in the mines, and in the town of Petrograd that became Leningrad, obviously, later. You're going to know how to do this. The war itself, as in all of the countries that participated in World War I, had done enormous ravages. The Germans are fighting inside Russia, and the subsequent civil war that decimated large parts of the countryside left the country barely able to function. In 1921 and 1922, this is in what you're reading, more than seven million people died of starvation and sickness during that period. Remember, the wars go on. The war against Poland goes on until finally the situation is resolved with the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which I don't think is in your book. Lenin implemented the New Economic Policy. As he and the other Soviet leaders grappled with a country in virtual collapse, he recognized that the ideology of communism, which called for the abolition of private property, private ownership, and the destruction of the free market, would have to be sacrificed for the future. You simply had to be able to feed people. You had to have peasants not hoarding what they produced, or waiting for higher prices. You needed to have a free market system, at least for a while, because of the fact that people resisted, which was what was called war communism, which was sort of a shock communist therapy that had proved not to really work at all. So, the New Economic Policy is promulgated in March of 1921, and the features of it you can read about. Basically, the state maintains its centralized control over the economy, and there's still centralized planning, but the NEP allowed peasants to use their land as if it was their own, and largely, in most cases it still was, and allowed them to market their products, and sell them at market prices in order to get food to people who needed it. Otherwise, they too would have died. The state maintained its control over heavy industry. But this is all going to be just a small retreat along the road to socialism. It succeeded. It succeeded. It works. Gradually the production of food reached prewar levels, and small-scale industrial production revives. Another name I should have written on the board--I was so tired when I did all this last night-is Kulaks. Two groups of people who profited during this period, these two groups of people would, in the long memory of the communist leadership, get theirs during the Five Year Plan. The first are those people who, for example, were small merchants--not in size, but they sold products on the free market and did very, very well during this period of the New Economic Policy. They became known as NEP men. NEP is the New Economic Policy, and the NEP men were people who did well during this period. The other, and it's a term, as we'll see in a while, that became a term of denigration, and indeed could lead you straight to the gulag if you were lucky and weren't executed before that, were Kulaks.

Kulaks basically were prosperous peasants. They were well-off peasants. During the period of the New Economic Policy the Kulaks, the people with land who had something to sell, did well indeed, because their goods fetched good prices and they did very well. With the gradual ending of the New Economic Policy, which sort of trickles to an end after Lenin, they would become targets in the mass collectivization campaign that accompanied the Five Year Plan, that is 1928 to 1933, and would be themselves victims of the purges as we'll see. The tragedy of the Russian Revolution. There's a quote in there from--I guess it was somebody in the Red Army who said, "Did we do all this? Did we fight in the civil war? Did we try to save the revolution against some really basically horrible legions and the white armies during the civil war? Did we save the revolution in order to round up Kulaks, and put them in the middle of a field, and line them up in the middle of a field, and gun them down with machine guns to kill them? Did we do all of this to eliminate from the face of the earth these people who had, despite being relatively privileged, had struggled, and had managed to survive the whole thing?" Sadly, the answer is yes. It came to that. The question is: To what extent was this automatically--was this part of the system from the beginning? I'll give you some examples that Holquist cites in a minute. He says you can see this coming if you look at the first years of the Soviet people. Let me give you some examples of this. This is before the period where Stalin becomes a success. Stalin worked very hard to make it seem--as Lenin had one stroke and then another--Stalin tried to keep access closed to other people. He worked feverishly to make it seem that Stalin was the chosen successor of Lenin. There are some famous doctored photographs where Stalin has had himself inserted next to Lenin, in famous poses of Lenin, who was a pretty good speaker, but nothing like Trotsky. Trotsky, with Jean Jaurs, was the greatest orator of the entire period. But Lenin wasn't too bad. Stalin literally had himself stuck into pictures where he would be there. He also took some of Lenin's writings and sort of "updated" them to make it seem like the mantle was there. As everybody knows who follows this stuff at all, Lenin was, in his final days, most concerned that comrade Stalin's leadership was potentially very dangerous. He expressed those fears in the letter, if I remember correctly, written with a very shaky hand of a man who had a stroke, a very serious stroke, and who was close to death. He had his doubts about comrade Stalin, not exactly from the beginning. Also, it's important to note that Trotsky-whom as I said the other day would finally be tracked down and assassinated in a garden in Mexico City--the differences between Trotsky and Stalin went beyond ideology. Trotsky, in

what became known as the "left opposition," that was pushing for more active instigation of revolutions in other places, and, ironically, was pushing even more for collectivization even early on. But it went more than that. There was a rivalry between two men who both were extraordinarily sure of themselves, and who thought that they were the person who should first save, and then lead, the Soviet Union. Trotsky's role in the Red Army as a strategist was extremely important. But there was more than that also. There was more than a small trace of anti-Semitism in Stalin. When he would refer to "cosmopolitan enemies," and things like that. Cosmopolitanism was sort of a code word for Jews, for Jewish people within the party. There was more than that to that. Trotsky is expelled from the party, and then finally is tracked down and killed. Some of these that you know from reading Orwell, some of these factions and these differences play themselves out in this anticipation of World War II that was the Spanish Civil War. The followers of Trotsky are a very important faction in the Spanish Civil War. You know from reading Orwell the role of the Stalinists in all of this. Just a few things before I turn to Holquist's argument about how you can see some of the horrors coming early on. Let me just define Stalinism as a term. It's a set of tenets, policies, and practices that characterize the Soviet government during the period when Stalin is in power. Stalinism lasts until Stalin finally dies--when is it? 1953. That is when Stalin dies. The beginning of the Five Year Plan, that is 1928 to 1933, is really the real beginning of Stalinism. You can anticipate some of this, as we'll see in a minute. Stalinism not only takes a sort of democratic centralism of decision making, but what it does is it employs state coercion, and more than this, state terror, with the goal of transforming this still relatively backward society into a Soviet state that could sustain itself, that could build heavy industries. This was the obsession of Stalin and Stalinism, that heavy industries would have to be built, and that they would be built on the backs of the peasantry, who would lose their land and become industrial workers. There's a massive urbanization, as we'll see, in the Soviet Union during this period. The obvious central characteristics of Stalinism, as you've already seen, are the abolition of private property, first of all, and the end of free trade, the end of the market. The market is to disappear. If you're abolishing private property in a vast, vast state, in which two generations before you still had serfs, what you want to do from their point of view is collectivize agriculture. The massive collectivization of agriculture. This would, as you know, become a characteristic of the satellite states in Eastern Europe and Eastern Central Europe with varying degrees, varying degrees in those states. The economy is planned. It's run in a centralized

fashion and predicated upon mass industries, rapid industrialization. Part of this was the liquidation--not a nice word--of those "exploiting classes," that is the bourgeois, the NEPmen, the Kulaks, the aristocrats, and the clergy. This involves deporting people to the gulags, or incarcerating them wherever they were, or incarcerating them in the gulags. The purge, the terror, the political terror against alleged enemies, including those who disagreed with Stalin within the leadership of the Soviet Union. Thus, the purges that you can read about of the left opposition of Zinoviev and Trotsky, and Bukharin's right opposition. With this comes the cult of personality. Stalin himself becomes, and I say this in quotes, "a czar-like figure." There are still truck drivers in Russia who have pictures of Stalin in their trucks, and other people as well. This leads, obviously, to kind of half-baked political scientists' interpretations, "Well, you have a czarist state. You have an autocracy. Inevitably it becomes another autocracy with a czar-like figure, the cult of personality of Stalin." When you think of Mao's China, and there the cult of personality, if anything, was even more than that with the Little Red Book and all of this business. To repeat the obvious, the Soviet Union was the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and the dictatorship of the Communist Party was the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, and the paranoia of Joseph Stalin. Now, ironically, Stalin, as I'm sure you know, was not Russian, even though the Soviet Empire, and it was that, was largely run in the interest of Russia and Russians. Stalin was a Georgian. He was from the country in which all these things have happened in just the last five or six months. He started out as a seminary student. He was expelled for reading Marxist tracts. Like a lot of these people, he took aliases, because he robbed banks to get money for the Bolshevik party. Stalin means in Russian "man of steel." That was his alias. That wasn't his original name. Remember, he's a Georgian. As I just said, he becomes the administrator, the Commissar of Nationalities, but determined to snap the head off of the "hydra," of the danger of nationalist revival in these states. Communism, in theory, was antithetical to nationalism; although, ironically, as you all know, it doesn't really work that way. There were strongly nationalist communist states that still retained--Hungary, for example, or Czechoslovakia that retained, even within the satellite nature, kind of a pride in trying to make it work even in 1968, as Dubcek, before the tanks roll into Prague, tries to make a human-faced socialism with a Czech and Slovak face. Of course, it doesn't work. Through the whole period, as everybody knows, they execute millions of people. In World War II, the figures of the number of Soviets who die in World War II is about twenty-five million people. If you're thinking about Stalingrad, and thinking about the siege of Leningrad, which goes on and on and on and takes a million lives, but within that

twenty-five million, lots of those people are people who died in the gulags. They did not die from reasons of war. They died in the gulags, and many of them were executed for being a Kulak, or being a NEP man, or whatever. Can you see this coming? Can one see this coming? Just a couple of points along the way. During World War I, states had increased their power, their ability to control what became sort of command economies to mobilize the resources of the state. In Russia in World War I, the imperial government, Holquist writes, "initiated a deportation of the Jewish element' -remember, the rabid anti-Semitism of the czar and Alexandra--"on the borderlines as pernicious, harmful, and dangerous to the Russian people,'" and thus in wartime they are, just as in Italy. Italy went to war in part so that they had the idea that they could somehow make citizens Italian, feel themselves Italian. There is this nature as the war is being fought in Russia that you will increase the Russianness of the effort of the empire, even though all these other nationalities are involved, by excluding people, by excluding people. They're not excluding people by putting them up on the wall and shooting them. Nonetheless, the language is somewhat there. For example, they describe the Whites, who were a nasty group, many of them, and just nasty, bloodthirsty group, not all of them, but many of them. They describe the Jews as "microbes." This is the Whites describing the Jews as "microbes" and Bolshevism as a "social disease." The kind of disease metaphors, the next step is if you have a disease, if you have a cancer, you cut it out. You exclude it by cutting it out. The language of exclusion is already there. At one point the Soviets, in the very first part of the Soviet Union, began a program of what they called "dekazakhization." They want to remove an entire Kazakh population, which they viewed as potentially disloyal to the revolution. But you can't do that. It's just too hard to do that when all these other things are going on, so they can't do that. In the early years, the Lenin years, you still find these things. In 1920, when there's a campaign against banditism, that is bandits or people who don't support the Communists--that term is often used, by the way, in France under Vichy, that the resistors are bandits, or they're terrorists, etc. etc. Bandits become a dangerous epidemic. Again, the disease metaphor. They're dangerous because they are. In 1920, Stalin informed Trotsky, Holquist found, that an order would soon come directing "the total extermination of the White officer corps." Of course, total extermination is pretty strong language. That's not just simply putting people in jail or in a re-education camp. That is getting rid of them. They create camps which were called "filter spaces," where people could be kept until they had seen the light, etc., etc. They had all these White prisoners, some of whom executed, and the Cheka are the police who oversee all of this. That's an obvious term.

Examples from the civil war, in Holquist's words, "show the project of fashioning society by excising particular elements was an intrinsic aspect of Soviet power from the very beginning." But it's not on the scale that would come later. There are lists of people drawn up in the early 1920s that would be used in 1937 and 1938, during the Great Purge. So, when the campaigns of collectivization, which are bloody, which are massacres, come along, the dekulakization campaign, get rid of the Kulaks, in 1929-1930, becomes on a more urgent and more paranoid scale. This is the kind of stuff that we now know from the archives. A memorandum from March 15 1931 states that with regard to the Kulaks, the goal of deportation from all regions was "to totally cleanse them of Kulaks." Another, slightly earlier, in February, calls for them to be "immediately liquidated. We will exile the Kulak by thousands and when necessary shoot the Kulak breed. We will make soap of the Kulaks. Our class enemy must be wiped off from the face of the earth." Strong language. Thus, in 1930, more than 20,000 Kulaks were sentenced to death. Many more are gunned down when they protest. And they protest. They kill their animals rather than turn them over to the commissars. They burn their harvest. They burn their farm. These are "weapons of the weak," as my dear friend, Jim Scott in the political science department, would call it. Weak indeed they were. They're confronting these enormous military forces. But they fight back. They fight back. They just don't go down in a heap without fighting. One of the interesting things about this is just as one of the key trends in the end of the nineteenth century is the origins of sociology--intellectual trends, the idea of counting, and figuring, and thinking about contemporary society, Max Weber and all that. Really important stuff, positivism and all of this. These kinds of censuses developed way before all this. The first really accurate census in France, outside of municipal ones, is in 1941. But what they do is they use sort of modern tools of censuses, surveys, and questionnaires, to get information on the entire population. You'd better be damn careful when you write down who you are on one of these forms. When they say, "Who is your grandfather?" "What did your grandfather do?" What are you going to write? You can't write down he was an industrial worker if he wasn't. What if he's a Kulak? What if he's a noble? What if he's an Orthodox priest? You're guilty by association. Once a Kulak, once a clergyman, once an aristocrat, by class identity you are guilty. You are guilty. They used the censuses of 1926, and 1937, and the last one before the war of 1939, as a way of deciding who should get passports and who shouldn't get passports, and who should be sent off to wherever. By 1934, twenty-seven million people in the Soviet Union had been monitored and given state ID cards. The French, you had to have an ID card, also, to go from

one department to the next, to go from Marseilles to Nice you had to have an internal passport. What they do, it's the same state thrust, except that it has a murderous outcome. If you're classifying people, if you're counting people, if you're registering people, this is way before "the quiet violence of the computer," as Michelle Perrot memorably put it. The outcome is very different. They use archivists. Some of my friends were archivists. They're not going to be doing this kind of thing. These are French archivists. But they're using archivists who are fearful for their lives. If you're an archivist with writing and reading skills, you're potentially an enemy of the state, because you're from the wrong social class. They say, "We want to look at your archives. We want you to find out who's in what category in your region." You better do it. Archivists in 1939, according to Holquist, identify 108,000 enemies of the people. Once you're classified as an enemy of the people, baby you're toast. That's it. You're toast. Sheila Fitzpatrick is a wonderful historian. She was one of the first to study what she calls "the extraordinary everydayness" of Stalinism. What was life like in a place where the only way of getting anything, and potentially the only way of surviving, is your relationship to a bureaucratic figure? Stalinism, the essence of state collectivization, of state totalitarianism, is you have to have this enormous bureaucracy. It's the bureaucracy that calls the shots. Let me put some of the points that are important. In getting by, who are apt to be the militants in all of this? Who are apt to be the true believers in all of this, the most loyal to the project of creating this new world, this new world that never came? The answer is young people, younger people. There were many cases of younger people denouncing their parents, being asked to denounce their parents. But the most militant and the most faithful were people who had not, who in the 1930s, for example, if they were twenty-five years old, they didn't really remember the old regime. They didn't remember the czarist autocracy. They are more likely to think that there's nothing wrong with trying to decide who still has religious icons on their walls, whose parents religiously went to church. The young people were more apt to be the militants in all of this. If you were a militant, what you did was you denounced class enemies, these Kulaks and the priests, members of the pre-revolutionary nobility, former capitalists. Again, once a capitalist, you are always a capitalist. Once a Kulak, you are always a Kulak. People who had been declared as "non-toilers," that is people who are not really workers or really peasants, who are Kulaks, they are deprived of the vote, not that elections subsequently meant anything in the Soviet Union, as early as the constitution of 1918. These young militants undertake a war on bourgeois specialists. One of the problems with the campaign for rapid industrialization is

they're really torn. You need these bourgeois specialists, because they're technocrats. They're the ones that have to keep up the production count. They have to keep it up there. Then you go into this period and you say, "You can't have a bunch of bourgeois specialists who are educated." So, those people get liquidated, maybe not killed but get removed. Then they will bring in and replace them with peasants who sometimes had absolutely no education, which is not their fault at all. The Soviets do educate people in this period. There's a huge increase in literacy in this period. But they're turning over important management positions within the Soviet Union, in this push for rapid industrialization, to people who can't read and write, and really just don't have the kind of finesse or the kind of ability to do it. That causes all sorts of problems. The bureaucracy is increasingly filled with people who are not competent, but are there because of their party loyalty. If you weren't loyal to the party, there was nowhere you were going to go. How does this affect ordinary Soviet citizens? There's constant propaganda, talk about the radiant future, that enormous sacrifices now will be worth it in the end. Marx, after all, said scientific socialism is going to take a long time. Thus, if you see these, and I've been in the Moscow subway a long time ago, but these sort of heroic murals of the Soviet worker, the Stakhanovite. Don't write it down. I think he's in the book, but this guy, Stakhanov, was a guy who had apparently set a world record by extracting the most coal any human had ever done. It was basically made up. But he became this kind of image of hard work. I'll tell you, you'll see a lot of these art deco murals in Detroit, Michigan. Or, for example, I'm not making this as an analogy, but there was the equivalent under National Socialism, also, the idea of the German worker toiling away and all that, with the interests of the state. Basically it's the idea that Russia could be moved by hard work out of backwardness toward this radiant future. It does keep people going. There's always this contrast between "then," the bad old days when these folks ruled--the NEP men, and the Kulaks, and the aristocracy, and all of that--and the inevitable future. The landlords were gone. There's collective ownership of the means of production, so everything has got to be okay. The motto is, "The party is always right," and you'd better believe it. The state shaped the way people lived. Part of it, those people lived through the purge. I'll tell you a story. I had this colleague a long, long time ago when I first came here who grew up in Moscow in the 1930s. His father was the Persian ambassador to Moscow. In the purges people were now seeing their parents, and people were being taken away in the night, and there were boots in the hall, and it was a pretty damn scary time to live. One day he was in this big school. He

was in collge, middle school. He's twelve years old, basically. He is sitting in one of these big buildings there, and the bell rings to go from one class to the next class. The bell rang and the guy who was sitting in front of him, a twelve-year-old boy, gets up. He puts his cartable down, his book carrier down, and he goes out. They're on the fifth floor. He goes to the stairwell and he jumps over to his death, just like that. He stepped over the thing and fell. If you're twelve years old you're going to remember that kind of thing. He didn't know, because you didn't discuss such things, whether he had denounced his parents and felt badly about it, or whether his parents had been taken away and he didn't have any idea where they were. This was one of the tragedies also. A lot of it is self-deception. These were very poor people. You believe in the radiant future. This is a very, very poor place. You saw these Stalin skyscrapers. There's a big debate in Warsaw whether the one that's there should be kept. You saw more literacy. You saw sometimes products on the market. But the deception was there. The great hopes were there. The reality was completely different. You would have bizarre things happen. Suddenly, you have state planning. For a while there were all these red female stockings on the market. That was supposed to be cool. You had a lot of Western visitors who had seen these same female red stockings, which were very much "in" in Paris and Berlin. But this wasn't Paris and Berlin. This was Moscow. Suddenly, you have a lot of that. Someone thought, "Ketchup will look good to the outsiders when they come." So, they start producing ketchup. There's nothing to put the ketchup on. The most ridiculous example I've ever heard is that they started producing lots of bathtubs, because people are waiting in line to get apartments, which was true until 1992. They're waiting in line to get apartments, though things got a lot better after World War II, but still. If you're going to have an apartment that is of progress, the radiant future, you've got to have a bathtub. So, they produce all these bathtubs, but they forget to produce corks or stoppers. So, for a long time you had people that were lucky enough to have bathtubs, but the water just runs out and they could show them off to their friends. It simply doesn't work. But there is the illusion, and I'm going to have to end with this, because I went too long earlier. There's more to say but there's always more to say. There was the illusion. There were lots of true believers and people who also wanted a radiant future. In the late 1960s, please, not the early ones, and the 1970s, we were all dealing with our ideology of the weak. I had an uncle who meant a great deal to me who was a communist. He was trained in Berlin as a psychoanalyst. He worked for a Communist newspaper, and he claimed to have know Georgie Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist leader. He was a true

believer always. At the end of his life he ended up passing, or having his wife pass Save the Will petitions. He was no longer a communist. But I remember when I was a little boy him telling me that the people trying to escape from communism were psychotic. That people trying to get over the wall in Berlin were psychotic for trying to leave this radiant future of a workers' paradise. There were a lot of true believers. These people, a lot of them, and I'm not dissing my uncle whom I loved deeply, and who meant a great deal in my life, and especially my aunt. They believed. People would go to these show trials and they would see people saying, "Yes, I was in cahoots with Romanian fascists," or with Dutch fascists, or with Georgian nationalists, or something like that. They would admit to all sorts of things, possibly hoping it was going to save their lives. It didn't. It never did. They were executed. Stalin executed them all. He executed the entire general staff practically of the army. One of the most amazing things about the Second World War is how the Red Army not only survived but won, and retrained people. There weren't any admirals left. There was nobody left. He killed them all. He killed them all. But people continued to believe. They believed. The whole phrase, maybe you've heard of the phrase, "a Potemkin village." I guess that's a good place to end--a Potemkin village. For example, if you're watching an old TV western and you see a faade, you've got the bar, and you've got Miss Kitty, and you've got all of this, and a few people punching each other out; there's nothing behind it. It's just all a fraud. It's nothing. They would bring these visitors from the West in this brave new industrial world, and they'd see parts of towns that had been reshaped. They meet the first literate people in a family. It was very true. Some good things happened, too. But they were far outweighed by the bad things. But a Potemkin village would be, you'd go and you'd see this faade and you'd be whisked through. "This is where the children's railroad will be." "This is where the kindergarten is going to be." It's always the "going to be," and it never happened. That, I suppose, is the tragedy of the Russian Revolution. Arguably, maybe, who knows, a good idea gone terribly, terribly bad.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 22 Transcript November 19, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: I assume you saw Triumph of the Will. I think I mentioned the other day Leni Riefenstahl only died about four years ago, at age 102. She did interviews, and just looked back on that regime as, she was a professional and she did a good job. Her employers, in this case Adolf Hitler, were pleased with her work. What's interesting about the film, among the many things, and some of the themes I'll touch on and you're reading about, is that it's a combination of the kind of medieval and the very modern. Hitler, like Mussolini, used modern technology. Germans who could barely afford to eat had radios, and listened to speeches of the Fuhrer, and it was the same thing in Italy with Mussolini. While you saw the

images of kind of medieval Nuremburg, which no longer exists, medieval Nuremburg, or not much of it, and the kind of modern technology and the whole thing. Hitler liked airplanes. He liked to fly around, and for all of the kind of images of the German warriors, kind of a medieval person diving in frozen Pomeranian ponds and things like that, the modern is apparent, too. If you want, the most chilling example of the modern would be the assembly line, the transformation of the assembly line into mass murder. The assembly line in the death camps. Has anyone here been to Auschwitz? I've been to AuschwitzBirkenau. I've been to Dachau, also, a long, long time ago, but Auschwitz fairly recently. One of the most chilling things about Auschwitz, actually, the sheer--it's just beyond anything, but it's the commandant's house. The commandant's house has little swings out behind it. That's where the commandant lived. His wife said this was the happiest time of their lives. The little children were playing in the garden on the swings, and there's a big wall there, but not a huge wall. The crematoriums are on the other side in that part, at Auschwitz. Birkenau s a couple kilometers away. Life went on in that way as this sort of assembly line--mass murderers of millions and millions of people. Hungarian Jews outnumbered Polish Jews exterminated at Auschwitz just barely. That's because at the end of the war the Hungarians were sending these huge trainloads of people to be exterminated there. Anyway, I want today to talk about Adolf Hitler. I will bring into this some of the themes that you're reading about. Just two things at the beginning. Obviously, National Socialism was one variant, certainly the most horrible variant of fascism. You can put Franco into that mix. There was rightwing authoritarian rule everywhere. Secondly, like World War I, there's no other period of history that has such great literature, at least in English, about it. There's a wonderful trilogy by Richard Evans on Hitler and the Nazis to 1933, and the second volume is 1933 to the war, September 1, 1939. The third is 1939 to the end, to the bunker. There are many biographies of Hitler. I've read about three of them. But the best by far is Ian Kershaw's two volumes. It's very long, and I'll be drawing on that in part. Let's get going on that. There's a photo that's not in the book, but there's a photo of Hitler reviewing his guys. That particular photo, which was taken about 1927, was on a huge field. You see Hitler reviewing his guys there. What people don't realize is that picture was taken from a huge-there are lots of other people out there, little groups like the Nazis. It might have been a little earlier. They, too, have their leader, their Fuhrer. Hitler ends up, the National Socialists end up winning, but they weren't the only group.

I'm not a believer in the "great person" view of history. Hitler did not make the Nazis. World War I created the Nazis. A lot of the racism, a lot of the idea of hygienics, racial purification, and all of that was out there, as you know and I've tried to make clear. But if it wouldn't have been Hitler, there would have been somebody else. In 1933, when Hitler becomes chancellor, when the other rights, there are many rights, but when Von Papen says, "We've got them boxed in now. We can use Hitler for our own goals." How incredibly nave that was. The Nazis must be seen in the context of World War I. They must be seen in the context of the poisoning of the political atmosphere between the wars. In 1876, Alois Schickelgruber--I didn't write it on the board; I sent this stuff around to you today, a lot of it, but Schicklgruber is not on the list--changed his name to Alois Hitler. It was a peasant family in lower Australia--lower Australia? Lower Austria!--bordering on Bohemia. I've been to lower Australia. I've been to lower Austria, too. But anyway, bordering on Bohemia. Thus, the family's dislike of Czechs, and Hitler's particular dislike of Czechs. But he disliked everybody outside of Germans. His father was "illegitimate," and ended up with the name of his mother's long-deceased wife's father, Georg Heidler, which in 1876 became Hitler, as I said. There was a rumor even during the 1920s that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish, and these rumors circulated in Munich in the 1920s. Hitler was born in Braunau-am-Inn on the border of Germany, that is the Austrian-German border. This was important in his obsession with uniting the two countries. His father was a customs official, comfortable kind of lower-class existence. But it was not a happy family at all. His father was strict, pompous, proud of his minimal status, extremely pedantic, and had a violent temper. He took care of bees with more loving attention than he took care of his family. He managed the family with efficiency, but without love. Hitler's mother is described by Ian Kershaw as a simple, modest, kindly woman, who went to church and was devoted to her two surviving children, Adolf and Paula. She smothered them with protectiveness. Adolf Hitler feared but did not love his father, but this does not explain the murderous results of the whole thing. Civil servants get moved around, customs people. The family moved to Linz, L-I-N-Z, in Austria, which was a hotbed of anti-Semitism, in 1895. Hitler began his schooling at age six. He viewed Linz as his hometown, and, in not a terribly too happy early life, looked back almost nostalgically upon living in Linz. He did not pick up his antiSemitism in Linz. He started secretary schooling in 1900, but he was unsatisfactory in math and in natural history. He didn't like his teachers. He was, in principle, respectful, but he thought himself above many of them. He was badly adjusted. His father wanted him to be a

civil servant. He wanted him to follow and be the next in line of the Hitler civil servants. But Adolf, as you know, resisted. He wanted to be an artist. His father said, "You will not be an artist as long as I am living." Linz was--besides being a hotbed of anti-Semitism, it was a hotbed of German nationalism. Not just Austrian German-speaking nationalism, but German in general nationalism. His father died in 1903 and then Hitler hit the academic skids. He failed in math. He moved to another school fifty-miles-away in a place called Steyr, but it wasn't any better. Then he took up this sort of idle existence. He painted. He read poetry. He attended the theater. That was one of his great loves in Linz, 1905-1907. He had one friend, August Kubizek, who was the son of an upholsterer. Hitler dominated. He needed somebody to listen to him. Kubizek was exposed, and I suppose willingly, to Hitler's diatribes, his pontification, his monologues about virtually everything. He was the classic kind of know-it-all. He was pale, thin. He had that little mustache that would become bigger. He wore a black coat and a dark hat. He carried a black cane with a pretentious ivory handle. His great passion was Wagner--Those of you who know about music know that Wagner was a raving anti-Semite--as well as art and architecture, about which he claimed to know a great deal. He wanted to begin his artistic career at the academy in Vienna, and his mother had fallen ill with cancer and soon died. She died in 1907. This struck him as a "bolt out of the blue," he remembered. He applied for the academy in Vienna, and, to his horror, he was turned down. He went to Vienna anyway in February 1908, hoping to become an architect. He said later, "I owe it to that period that I grew hardened." He lived in Vienna from February 1908 until May 1913. He said later, after the war, during his political ascent, that it was during that period that "my eyes were opened to the two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names"--Marxism and Jewry, the Jews. This appears in Mein Kampf, My Struggle, which he wrote when he was in Landsberg prison not far from Munich--I even visited the cell once--after the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. This was out of retrospect. There is really no evidence that he had become a raging anti-Semite before 1914. Yet, anti-Semitism was so prevalent in Austria. Karl Lueger, who was the mayor of Vienna, whom I mentioned before, was one of the worst in that period. I've given this chilling quote before, but I'll say it again. He's the one who said, "I decide who is a Jew." The liberalism that had been in Vienna in the earlier period was hardened, like Hitler, became hardened into just a vast intolerance. But at the time he said that these two menaces were known to him, he was struggling. He wanted to be the man in leadership of the German

Reich. In saying this, if you believe Kershaw, and I do on this and on much more, this was a fabrication. The anti-Marxist, the anti-socialist and subsequent anti-communist after 1917, that was there. His long diatribes in this sort of shabby rooming house, where they would sit around, and finally you can imagine one by one people just getting tired of listening to Adolf, and going up to their miserable little rooms to get some sleep, were against the socialists. The Austrian socialists, like their German SPD counterparts, had long marches through the streets of Vienna on behalf of workers' rights, etc., etc. Hitler would stand on the porch of this rooming house and simply hate them as they went by. Yet, Vienna was a huge melting pot of this enormous empire. There are all sorts of people besides German speakers who lived in Vienna. Many of the German speakers were Jews, Freud among them. I've been to Freud's almost bizarrely recreated office there in Vienna. The Jewish population was about two percent of the population. In 1910 it was 175,000 people in Vienna. Then it grew to 8.6 percent of the population. Later, in Hitler's thundering speeches, over-the-top speeches, he saw Jews as capitalist exploiters of true Germans, etc., etc. This came later. Lueger, by the way, anticipated Hitler and lots of other people by saying in 1890 that "the Jewish problem" would be solved if all the Jews were placed on a large ship and sunk at sea. When Adolf Hitler lived with Kubizek in this rooming house, and went to the theatre with him, he was not yet thinking of politics. What he wanted to do was become this famous artist. It is true that he painted postcards for tourists, which he sold to kind of keep himself afloat. Kubizek was a piano player, so in the room was two beds and a piano and that was about it. Sometimes you could imagine Kubizek playing the piano just to try to tune out Adolf. But he was rather loyal to him. Hitler began to write a play. He went to the theatre, as I said, and he got a little bit of inherited money after his parents died. He had little interest in women. Of course, one of the sort of prevalent rumors is that he was impotent, though as you all know surely, he would marry Eva Braun in the bunker, before they took cyanide pills and killed themselves, as the Russian tanks could almost be heard rumbling above. We know of no sexual experience that he had. He described the ideal woman as a "cute, cuddly, nave little thing, tender, sweet, and stupid." Of course, like Mussolini, who was a notorious philanderer and used to brag tirelessly about his sexual exploits, both Hitler and Mussolini believed that a woman's place was in the home turning out baby boy soldiers and not in the factories. Of course, one of the ironies is during the Second World War that women are increasingly doing jobs that Hitler and Mussolini thought were inappropriate, simply because the men were dead. Anyway, he was prudish, seemingly repelled by sex, although fascinated by it.

One of the points that Kershaw makes is that Kubizek's recollections, along with that of Hitler's sister, Paula, give us a sense of some of the things that would remain characteristic of Hitler until his much-deserved end. Basically, he was lazy. He was manic at times. There would be these bursts of wild enthusiasm for something. During the war he would demand that the generals place maps in front of him, and he would make the decisions as the generals secretly moaned. He considered himself an expert in military affairs, as well. There was a pathological sense of reality and a sense of proportion, and a vindictiveness that, as most of you that have followed this at all would know, kept the Russian invasion, stalled it as he punished the Yugoslavs, poured troops into Yugoslavia to slaughter people, and then delayed the famous invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22nd. I was in Kiev once and the bells were all ringing. I realized that was the same time that the German planes had first arrived. His intolerance, his flashes of anger, his tediousness, his sense of predestined greatness, it was all there in the shabby little rooming house, the sense of frustration that his genius wasn't recognized. But there is no evidence of tirades against Jews. That would come later. Another friend of his, a guy called Hanisch, about whom I know nothing, said after Kubizek had disappeared from Vienna, "In those days Hitler was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards." In the words of Kershaw, the First World War made Hitler possible. In 1920 he said, for the first time in print, "Jews are to be exterminated." This is after the foundation of the German Workers' Party, early in 1919. Of course, it's that party that would become the Nazis. There is a picture that may be doctored--and that apparently is no longer in the second edition. It should be. It was in the first edition--of the war starting in Munich. I think I have mentioned this before. It's a crowd scene. The war has been announced. The war is not in Munich, but all these people are around the town hall, and they are just exuberant. You can see the smiling Hitler beaming, happy, fulfilled. He's going to fight for German nationalism. He did fight in the war. He was one of the guys. He was a comrade. He was wounded twice. He was a runner in the war. He carried messages from officers to the trenches, and then he--not literally ran but carried them. They called them runners. After the war he emerges, as do troops demobilized in every country, facing the challenges of an uncertain future. Nowhere was that future arguably more uncertain than in Germany. Not all veterans of the fight of the German war cause in World War I turned to far-right politics. The SPD, the Socialist Veterans Organization, was the largest of them all. Yet, there are just enormous continuities between those German soldiers who returned from the war with their weapons in their houses joining the Free Corps, the Freikorps. They kept on marching. They

kept on training in their basements. They would come back and therefore be exposed to all of these currents, the sense of betrayal again, as I've said before. This is the third time. How do you explain to the folks back home that you've lost the war when your troops are way inside of France? They're not perched on the frontier. They're way inside. So, it's got to be somebody's fault. Whose fault is it? It's the Jews. It's the socialists. And it's the Weimar Republic. These themes come together. That's a constant theme. Hitler believed if you told people the same lies over, and over, and over again that they would believe them. This happens in our country, too. In Hitler's case the lies were even more pernicious. The revisionism becomes an official policy of all of these rightwing groups, of all of them. The thing that's really just incredible is that the people had memories of Hitler--when you see pictures of him, this kind of pauvre type, you would say in French, this kind of sad sack wearing ill-fitting clothes, did not have friends. Kubizek had disappeared. I have no idea what happened to him. He had big hopes for himself that could never possibly be fulfilled. The idea of this--those of you who have partied in Munich on the tour, or something like that. I partied in Munich when I was twenty-years-old. We went to these places. But when you go into these big places like the Hofbruhaus, which was one of the worst, and these other places, it is hard to imagine. This is where the rightwing groups met. All of a sudden, this kind of sad sack guy, who'd jump or be lifted on a table. He wasn't terribly athletic. Suddenly, he has people listening to every word that he said for hours, for hours. Those speeches, if you ever heard speeches, if your German is really good--mine is terrible. It barely exists. People would listen on the radio. He would build up with this crescendo announcing the will to power, my struggle, our struggle, the German people's struggle, those who have destroyed us, those who signed on the dotted line of the war guilt clause that said that Germany started it all. "We will get them back," he says in 1925, when Mein Kampf was published. Isn't it 1925? I think it's 1925. He says, "We will kill the Jews." He says "We will expand elbow room, living space." We will expand to the east. He says this. You could buy copies of Mein Kampf in Manhattan. You could buy copies of it in Melbourne. You could buy copies of it anywhere. It was translated into a variety of languages. It was all there from the beginning. The consistency in what Hitler was telling was there all the way through. It was there all the way through. The concrete plans for the extermination of the Jews, as well as the gypsies, and of gay people as well, these concrete plans will come later. Dachau in 1933 was built with Himmler in charge, primarily to put communists in Dachau, and many Jews were communists, and later other people. I went to Dachau when I was your age. I remember seeing an old guy working in the fields right outside the wall. He was old

enough that that guy owned that farm back during the war. People knew. I'll come back to that in a minute. They knew. You try to think, "What did he think when he saw the people come in? What did he think when the smoke rose? What did he think?" They knew. They knew and they didn't care, point. If Hitler's themes barely changed, it raises some very important questions. Who first supported Hitler? Hitler's support--and I do write about this a little bit--the role of the economic crisis cannot be underestimated. The inflation statistics you will not want to commit to memory, but those are unbelievable. The only case that I know that is vaguely like that is Zimbabwe in the Mugabe period. This is even worse, if that is possible. Middle-class people who had to pawn armoires, chests, drawers, silver that had been in their family for years, in order to have enough to eat. They wouldn't forget, and they blamed, and they hated. "It's the fault of the allies. It's the fault of the Jews. It's the fault of the Socialists. It's the fault of the Communists. It's the fault of Weimar." They first flock to Hitler, the middle classes do. If this sounds like an orthodox Marxist interpretation, that's what the orthodox Marxists say and they're right. Big business did not flock to Hitler. Big business wanted the destruction of Weimar. They helped make Hitler possible. Only one big businessman gave Hitler a lot of money. He got a lot of small donations. But pretty soon he gets introduced to the right people, the right cocktail parties. They thought he was vulgar. Quick story. I had a colleague who died decades ago. He was very nice to me when I came here. He was a German diplomatic historian called Hans Gatzke. He wasn't Jewish and he wasn't a communist, that's for sure. He left Germany in the mid1930s because he didn't like what was going on. He didn't like what was going on. He got a job translating for the Canadian Olympic team. I said to him once, "Did you ever see Hitler?" He said, "Yes." He was under a stadium in Berlin. Like any big stadium, you've got space underneath. A lot of places have batting cages. Sometimes there's a baseball stadium or something like that. He was down there. He was supposed to meet the Canadian Olympic team. All of a sudden he heard this enormous roar of machinery, as machine gun carrying vehicles are coming in. By incredible coincidence, he had a couple pillars here, and just about where Leslie is, there was Adolf Hitler. He was scared, because there were machine guns. He stood there frozen. Would they gun him down? No. He just was standing there. I said, "What did you think? You are fifteen yards away from Adolf Hitler, less than that." He said, "I had a weird reaction. He was vulgar. He was an Austrian corporal. He sneezed and he blew his nose on his sleeve." That's what Gatzke remembered. Big business--Gatzke was a moderate political. He believed in the

Weimar Republic. He was a very good guy, a very kind of aristocratic guy. He was a Rhinelander. His reaction was the same as big business, except that big business wanted to destroy Weimar. The reaction was that Hitler was a commoner. He's vulgar. "We've got him locked in," they said in 1933. "We've got him boxed in. We can use him to our advantage and then have a military dictatorship." When von Stauffenberg tries to kill Hitler, and puts a bomb under the table that blows up but doesn't kill Hitler because a big, old, German wooden barrier the table stood on, he wasn't trying to bring parliamentary regime back to Germany. He wanted a military dictatorship. Hitler was supported by the middle classes disproportionately at the beginning. But in all classes people supported him, workers less so. But they break in 1933. They destroy the unions. They destroy the Communist Party. They use the Reichstag fire, which is actually set by the guy probably now we think, the Dutch guy, whom I write about in there. They destroy the unions. They destroy the possibility of resistance. But lots of workers were there, sieg heil, too, but less so than the other classes. What about religion? Hitler was a southerner. He never liked Berlin at all. He wanted to raze it and then this sort of art deco monument of his own planning. He was a southern guy. One of the places where he first does very well is Schleswig-Holstein, part of it used to be Danish, and it is totally Protestant. The Catholic Church rings the bell and reads what Hitler wants read from the sermons. They were happy to have Hitler there, as are the Protestants. There's no doubt about that. Fascism is in the air all over the place. The main elements of fascism that I list in that book, if you think about them, they all apply to Hitler and to the people who followed him: anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Weimar, the role of the economic crisis with long, long memories, and hating the allies, and hating the Jews, and hating the Socialists. The Nazis and other fascist groups are better at saying whom they were against than what they wanted. What they want is ultra-nationalism. What they want is a totalitarian state and the destruction of parliamentary rule. What they want is a dictator. They want a caudillo, as Franco was. They want a duce, as Mussolini called himself. They want a fhrer. They want a leader who incarnates in that mystical body, as they would view it, the aspirations of the German people. Part of who you were is who you were excluding. You have a vlkisch community, in the perverse biological racism of these people, and other people who aren't in it, too bad for them. If they are "work shy," Germans who don't want to work, then they're not really part of the vlkisch community. "I decide who's a Jew and who isn't." That's what Lueger said. Hitler says, and this is the horror of it all, "We decide who will live and who will die." They're using euthanasia as a tool

to kill people who are mentally handicapped, and even some people who are physically handicapped. Pretty soon, in the late 1930s, the Germans say, "Wait, these are Germans." If they're Jews who may be Germans, we don't consider them German. That's okay. Get rid of them. They pull back on that. But that's there from the beginning, ultra nationalistic, ultra antiparliamentarianism. You want the guy. He's going to represent you and he's going to tell you what to do. The terror is there. The violence is there. The Gestapo. There are hundreds of thousands of denunciations. If you denounce somebody, you could be sending them to torture and their death. There's no question about that. There are denunciations all the time. "Hey, my neighbor, I think he's Jewish. I know my neighbor down the hall. I know he was a big guy in the German Socialist Party, the SPD. I know that the butcher around the street, I might want his store, because I'm a butcher, too. I know he was a communist activist until 1933." You see denunciations. they've got them all the time. They've got them all the time. Here's a quote, somebody describing one of the Gestapo offices and the bureaucratization of terror: "Grimy corridors, offices furnished with Spartan simplicity, threats, kicks, troops chasing chained men up and down the reaches of the building, shouting, rows of girls and women standing with their noses and toes against the wall, overflowing ashtrays, portraits of Hitler and his aids, the smell of coffee, smartly-dressed girls working at a high speed behind typewriters, girls seemingly indifferent to the squalor and agony about them, stacks of confiscated publications, printing machines, books and pictures, and Gestapo agents asleep on the tables." Nobody had any illusion about what was going on. They didn't just rule through terror. The SS, by the way, everybody knows about the SS. They destroy the SA. Ernst Rhm challenges Hitler, and in the Night of the Long Knives, they wipe them all out. The SS was a form of sort of social mobility for people. These young guys come back after the war. There was no work. Pretty soon in the 1920s--the SS, you've got a uniform. You can go beat the hell out of communists, Jews, or anyone else and there's no--the judges are all Nazi sympathizers or rightwing sympathizers. They were all trained in the Empire. You can kill somebody and you'll be out of jail in a very short matter of time. You're working with impunity, especially in Prussia where Gring is the minister of the interior. It is all routinized. It is all there. They don't rule just through terror. That's what I did not emphasize enough in what you've read. It's going to be in the next edition. Hitler promises order. Order is zero tolerance on petty crime, for example. They have police who are called the Kripo (appropriately enough, in the English translation--pronounced creap-

o). They are sort of your basic police. They are not the Gestapo. They go out, and people who are lounging about, who are "work shy," that's a dangerous thing to be, "work shy." Petty criminals, people who are hungry, who are stealing apples off of fruit stands and things like that, they go out and make war on them. The German population nods enthusiastically, overall, as a whole. The war on crimes is something they like. Also, there's the economy. Hitler got credit from many German people for having revived the German economy. How does he do that? He does it by violating the statutes of the Treaty of Versailles. They're preparing for war. He's preparing for war all the way through. If the Rhineland occupation, the French and the Belgians had put up a fuss, it's possible that the whole thing could have been stopped there. It's possible. The generals are saying, " Mein Fuhrer, we're not really ready yet for war," while he is freezing his opponents, and they capitulate at one time after another, and the famous story of Neville Chamberlain, who'd returned bringing peace in his time after having sold out Czechoslovakia. But the German economy does revive. There are still huge gaps between the wealthy and people who aren't wealthy, enormous gaps. But the German economy does revive because of the same thing that happens in the United States in World War II--you're turning out, transforming the war economy. That's exactly what happens. He takes credit for this. There are a lot of flashy gestures. The VW--I went around Europe in a VW with a couple of my friends, sleeping on beaches, the little VW, the Volkswagen. But only one of them was ever produced. He promises the German people a Volkswagen, but only one model ever comes off, for the press and all that. The Autobahn. They're going to have routes, autobahns all over. Now there are in Germany and people driving 500 miles an hour with impunity. There are only 500 or miles of autobahn done by the time he's finished. Strength through joy. He announces a program that the Germans who have never been on vacation, ordinary working-class Germans can go on vacation. Some people did go on vacation. They all get drunk on cruise boats all over the place, but hardly anyone gets to go. But he gets credit for it. He seemed to be producing. He seemed to be producing. And, in a country in which anti-Semitism, despite the fact that Jews were terribly assimilated, was endemic, they liked the fact the Jews are disappearing. They like it and they know it. It's sheer nonsense to think that people didn't know what was going on. These trials are put in the papers all the time. "So-and-so has been condemned, being sent away to Dachau because of anti-state behavior, anti-German behavior," you name it.

People know. They have no doubts about it. Where do they think the trains are going? They can kind of imagine. Where are these people coming from? When all the Polish workers are coming in, being brought in as sort of slave labor, the ones who haven't been destroyed, when they're coming to work in the factories, where do these people think their families were? They're all dead. That's why Ordinary Men is such a chilling book. How these people, this police officer brigade in Hamburg, how these people can put bullets in the backs of heads of old ladies and little children in the killing fields around Lodz, or anywhere else in Poland, is just an extraordinary story. People knew. Not everybody knew, but they knew. They knew. For people who wanted order, this was their idea. This was the racial idea of order. The universities. What happens to the universities? Certain fields do real well. Racial hygiene. They establish chairs in racial hygiene. German folklore. They establish chairs in German folklore. Physics does very well, for obvious reasons. Physics equals rockets. Military history, chairs in military history, chairs in German history, chairs particularly in German medieval history. But anything else, your basic history, German literature, for example, doesn't do very well. There was a famous headline that is in the book saluting the fact that there were fewer visits to libraries, and people were checking out books in far fewer numbers than they did before. How do they pull this off? They pull it off through the atomization of society. There's a really wonderful book called The Nazi Seizure of Power, written by William Sheridan Allen about a town near Hanover. He changes the name of the town. People were so proud of that book in the 1960s. In the 1970s they put stacks of them and said, "That's us. That's us who were beating up the Jews. That's us who were beating up the communists. We are so proud." It's a very good book. There's another good book by Rudy Koshar, a friend of mine at Wisconsin on the town of Marburg. What they do is they get Nazis into every voluntary association, basically, and they take them over. What you have is the atomization of society, what Ian Kershaw calls "going to the Fuhrer." The only thing left is the family. You protect yourself and the family, or you thrive in the family, but you're in the family. Your children are in Hitler youth. There is no possible organized way of opposition. Soccer clubs, football clubs, everything is part of the atomization because it's been taken over by the Nazis. There is almost no resistance in Germany. I'll talk a little bit about this next time. This was a regime that is capable, as they did in Dusseldorf, of hanging sixteen-year-old boys because they listened to Benny Goodman, or were considered to be slackers, or "work shy." There's that phrase again. This atomization of German society makes all of this possible.

When Stauffenberg places his bomb, and the thing blows up and it doesn't kill Hitler, Hitler amused himself and his friends by--all of the people and all of the families of people involved, they filmed them being slowly strangled with wire. They laughed as they watched the film. The most chilling thing, even more than that, is that Germans pour into the street in thirty or forty different cities, as bombs have been raining down all the time. They thank God. Mein Gott, you saved our Fuhrer! That's extraordinarily difficult to explain. By 1944, the armies are full of old men and boys, because basically everybody else is dead. They keep fighting. They fight with astonishing, foolish courage, until the bitter end. They believed, not everybody believed, there will be a revival. Even the German Federal Republic was just replete with very proud former Nazis who take hugely important positions in power after that. Of course, the good old Americans help a lot of these Nazi war criminals escape to Paraguay and places like that, in exchange for information about communist movements and that sort of thing. They believed. They believed. Not everybody believed, but that's one of the scariest things about the whole thing, that it was sieg heil until the end. Again, not for everybody, not for everybody, but for some social classes and others. You find this in other countries, and I'll talk a little bit about that when--I guess I'll talk mostly about France next time. Hitler gives the German people what they want. His prestige, every time he stands down the British and the French, every time that he pulls this off--the occupation of the Rhineland, the absorption of the Sudeten part of Bohemia, and then they just take over the whole country, the Anschluss--where he's greeted enthusiastically by the crowds. You can see these photos of the adoring Viennese crowds. Where was the Vienna of calm concerts? It became the Vienna of Wagner. It became the Vienna of saluting Hitler and then going out and beating up and killing Jews. Something like 100 Jews are murdered in Vienna when Hitler arrives, to celebrate. They, too, believed. One of the dark secrets was the Nazi past of the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. All this came out before most of you were reading newspapers. Some of you were reading them back then. It was about fifteen years ago, or something like that. The people knew. Those are really the big points that I wanted to make. When you were reading, German women or German men waiting to get their hair done, when you read a popular newspaper or popular magazine, all of which had articles about Hitler, and this sort of entourage and all that, and you read a cheery headline, such as "Gas Masks for Children Now Readied." You sort of nodded and said, "We'll be ready for the struggle." What happened was Hitler's book,Mein Kampf, became perceived of and adopted by the majority of

people in Germany. Tragically enough, they remain with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis until the very, very bitter end. Of course, it's important to see the context is that in all of these places, whether you're talking about Brussels, whether you're talking about Amsterdam, whether you're talking about Prague, anyplace you're talking about in Europe, or Oswald Mosley strutting through Hyde Park with his little Naziling followers. Hitler was just the most violent, the most egregious, the most horrible, the most tragic example of what was a general phenomenon throughout the entire period, at different degrees of success during the 1920s and 1930s. The war that began in 1914 basically does not end, at least in Europe, until the defeat finally of Germany, and the death of Adolf Hitler, still at a relatively young age, in the bunker in Berlin.

European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 23 Transcript December 1, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: Okay, I want today to talk about collaboration, but above all, resistance in Europe during World War II. I'll talk mostly about France, because that's where there's been so much written about, and also because France coming to grips with the Vichy past was not an evident thing. It was something that took a long time. There was a process of

sort of collective and official repression about what had happened. I want to talk about that. Again, histories have their histories. I've been around here long enough that I can remember all this happening. Not the war, obviously, thank you, but France coming to grips with its past. I want to talk about that. We haven't talked about France in a long time. I'm going to talk about that. But first let me just say a couple things. Other countries had their resistors as well. It was obviously--the most successful case of resistance was that of ex-Yugoslavia. Well before the end of the war, Marshal Tito and his partisans, taking advantage of the mountains of ex-Yugoslavia, were able to pin down entire German divisions, and with weapons parachuted in by the allies, and with entire moving hospitals, were able to launch the most effective resistance, arguably, in Europe. Of course, the case of the Soviet Union, twenty-five million people died. Twenty-five million people died in World War II, most of them in the war, but lots also in Stalin's camps. A lot of partisans lost their lives picking off German soldiers, in the case of Poland. In the third edition there will be more on this. They got scarcely a mention. The Polish had a home army, as they called it, of about 300,000 people by the end of the war. The Warsaw ghetto rose up, and was crushed with 12,000 deaths and with thousands of other people sent away to the camps in 1943, then the Warsaw uprising. One of the reasons that Warsaw, where I'll be on Friday, and where I go fairly often--there was nothing left, because the uprising was crushed, and thousands and thousands of people lost their lives. I just reviewed a book actually for the Boston Globe called Ghettostadt, which is an interesting book by a man called Gordon Horowitz, who teaches in Illinois. It's about the Lodz ghetto. It's a tragic, all-to-familiar tale. It doesn't have anything to do with resistance, because it was impossible, but it was about the German ideas of creating this Aryan city in Lodz, which was a big industrial town, and still is, in Poland. Of course, what they did is they put all the Jews into the ghetto, which was several kilometers square, and put them to work making uniforms, and ear muffs, and all sorts of things for the German troops. In the story, the most horrific aspect of it is that the people in the ghetto, they don't really know. There's all these rumors about what's happening outside. Of course, what's happening is the killing fields, and three million Jews disappear in Poland in World War II, three million, three million. Gradually, and some people, before they are being killed by the Nazis, are forced to write cheery postcards saying, "All is well here in these camps. Everything is just delightful." Then they're executed. Gradually, it's about the mounting horror of the people who live there. They see clothes stacked up outside the ghetto

that they could recognize as having been on people they knew, who had been shipped away to the camps. The whole thing is so horrendous. It lives with us today. Obviously, it was easier to resist in places in which you could hide. When I talk about France, the reason--and I sent this term around--you called the French resistors the maquisards, or even just les maquis, is because they were able to hide behind brush called maquis. More about this later. So, resistance in Belgium, which is in the flat country except for the Ardennes was very, very difficult. There's hardly a hill that's more than a hump in Denmark, but yet is was the Danes in Copenhagen who saved the Jews, who got them out, with the help of a German officer, and were able to get them just across the very narrow straits to Malmo in Sweden. Other countries had their resistances as well. All those can't be covered now in this short amount of time--why am I supposed to have this glass here, actually? It has a label on it. I'm not supposed to have this glass here at all--I guess what I'll do is I'm going to talk about France and about the resistance there. Now, until about 1969, a year that I can remember, Altamont, the Mets win the series, but more important, protests against the war in the United States and mounting dissatisfaction with United States foreign policy. I can remember that very, very well. But until 1969, in France the official line was virtually everybody resisted, a few elites, a few notables, rural elites collaborated, period. The official line was one that was very closely tied to Gaullism. Because Charles de Gaulle, the big guy, his voice crackles over June 18, 1940. He calls on France to resist. Part of the myth that everybody resisted, or almost everybody, and few people collaborated, had to do with the official Gaullist policy, which is that Gaullists resisted. Charles de Gaulle, this mystical body of Charles de Gaulle, the body being greater than the sum of all its parts, led France, which essentially liberated itself. Of course, that's simply not true. Also, what that forgot about was the fact that the communists were enormously important in the resistance. More about that in a while. There was a film made, a documentary, I think in about 1953. I've never actually seen it. It had to do with the Jews. It had to do with what happened to the Jews in France. It was conveniently forgotten that the Jews in Paris who were arrested, in the Marais, in the Jewish section of Paris, and in other places, too, were arrested by the French police. The Germans would have been happy to do it, but they didn't need to, because the French police were so eager to do that. In this film, Jews and other people, communists and other people who were sent away, were packed off to a place called Drancy, which is, if you've ever taken the RER in from the airport or to the Roissy airport in Paris, you've gone through Drancy.

That was a transit camp. In transit camps, rather like Malines or Mechelen, in Belgium, or Westerbok in the Netherlands quite near the German border, these camps were run by French, Belgians, and Dutch, respectively. They were not run by the Nazis. The Nazis would have been happy to do it, but the local populations, the local collaborators were doing that. In this film made in 1953, in the original, you see a French gendarme who's guarding the Jews at Drancy, isn't in the film. In the documentary that was finally released, somebody has reached in and plucked him from the film. He simply disappears. It's doctored. The French gendarme, with his French gendarme hat, isn't in the film, because the myth was that the Jews were taken away by the Germans, and that communist resistors were shot by the Germans, and the gypsies and gay people were taken away by the Germans, were arrested by the Germans, and that France resisted and didn't collaborate. Now, two events--let me also tell you two stories. I hope I didn't say this the first day when I was trying to get you interested in learning about World War II. I worked in a place called Tulle when I was doing my research for my dissertation, long ago, and all that. I didn't have any money, and I'd go down and buy an ice cream cone for lunch every day. I started talking to this guy and I didn't speak French very well then. But I knew that there were a lot of people hung there. Ninety-nine men were hung. The Germans left. The maquis, the resistors, were very active there. Andr Malraux, the great writer, was active in a place called Argentat near there. One day the Germans all left, and then everybody came out and started partying, and the Germans came back. They hung ninety-nine men from poles in Tulle. One day I was there and this guy was telling me this story about how he had hidden. He had gone up--it's a real windy town in a valley--he'd gone up and hidden. You've got a house here and you've got room under the house. He was able to hide and escape. Because he was sixteen, he would have been hung. This woman came up and I was eating my ice cream cone. She ordered an ice cream cone. The guy suddenly said, "Madame Dupont, you remember that day, don't you?" She said, "I sure do. They hung my husband from that pole." How every day you could live with that and talk about that as if you were discussing where you had bought something at a sale. But the next step to thinking about that is who in France made all those things possible? Who was helping the Germans do that? The answer is that lots of people collaborated. Lots of people got what they wanted on a platter because of the Nazi victory. The same people who were shrieking "Better Hitler than Blum!" in 1936 got exactly what they wanted. Marshal Ptain, who was a rabid anti-Semite, his national revolution was essentially aimed to do in France what Hitler had done in Germany, and what other petty despots had done in

other places, some not so petty, like Hitler. They got what they wanted. So, how did the official line get shaken by reality? How did this happen? Second story. I have a friend who is still a lawyer in Paris. I've known him for a long, long, long time. He was too young to remember, but his older brother, who's dead now, remembered when the Germans came to his house in the suburbs, a place called Le Perreuxsur-Marne, took away the father, who was a Greek Jew. Of course, he was taken away and was killed. He ended up in one of the camps. They don't know what happened to him. Now, the Germans just didn't come to that house by chance. The guy was denounced as a Jew by the policeman in that town. After the war, every Saturday when this lady, the widow, went to the market, she walked by and saw this policeman directing traffic, the same guy. Nothing ever happened to him. Nothing ever happened to him. So, how did the official version get eliminated by historical reality? Histories have their histories. How did that happen? There are two events that are kind of key. They're both in what I sent around. One is the movie, The Sorrow and the Pity, which I mentioned in here before, which was described as a two six-pack movie in the old days when I used to show it here, because it lasts four and a half hours. It was a documentary made for French television by Max Ophls. It was never shown on French television until 1981. Why? Because it was a documentary in which collaborators--there's sort of a local notable called Christian De la Mazire, who describes in his smoking, his smoking, in his fancy jacket in the chteau, why he fought alongside the Nazis on the Eastern Front in the Waffen SS. It's about collaboration and resistance, tales of true heroism but also of repressed memory. There's a great scene in which they're walking through the school. They ask about the teacher, a teacher who disappeared. They don't even remember about it. They don't remember it, the guys that are being interviewed. They've conveniently forgotten. So, The Sorrow and the Pity was never shown on French TV until 1981. It's a fantastic thing. It's too long, and I should have never shown it. I started showing it twice in sections. Also, it's kind of dubbed and it's very hard to understand either in French or in English. It's a monument. It's a monument not just because it's a driving, forceful documentary, but it helped France rediscover its past. Fabulous. Talking about the role of the Communist Party. Again, I'm not a communist, but I'm telling you, the Communist Party had an enormous role in the resistance. Most of it's about Clermont-Ferrand, the area. It's based on the Auvergne town of Clermont-Ferrand. There's this great scene where these two peasants out in the countryside say, "Nous sommes rouge, comme le vin," "We're red like the wine we're drinking." It's a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous

thing. Of course, there's the inevitable scene at the end where women who were called, indelicately, "horizontal collaborators," had their heads shaved and were being paraded through the town. That happened all over the place. Les tondeuses is what you called them in French. It doesn't matter what you call it in French. In the end, there's Maurice Chevalier. Your grandparents will know who Maurice Chevalier was, because he kind of represented, in the American imagination, what France was. He was a crooner. He was a singer who was born in L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer, which is in a proletarian edge of Paris, right near where Edith Piaf, the singer, was, whom your grandparents would have heard of also, people way before my time. But at the end of the movie they have him and he's wearing his little crooning suit and he says in English, "Well, you know there are zees rumors that I was singing for zee Germans. But I just want to tell you that I was only singing for zee boys," that is, for the prisoners of war. He was dealing with his own past as well. Francois Mitterrand, president of France for fourteen years beginning in 1981, when he was inaugurated, the cameras follow him through the Panthon. He follows him by where the heart or some part of Jean Jaurs is left. But Francois Mitterrand, when he was dying, he came to grips with his own past. When he was dying, he too, like France, said, "There was a moment when I was not a resistor," which he became a resistor. But there was a moment that he had celebrated Vichy, and somebody had found a picture of him in a right-wing rally in 1936 or 1937, of which there were many in Paris. He, too, came to grips with his past. This all started, the history of history started in the 1970s. The second event was a book published by my good friend Robert Paxton. He's about ten years older than me, probably more than that. He wrote a book called Vichy France, published in 1972. Vichy France could not use French archives, because they weren't available. There's a fifty-year rule in French archives. But there's also a site--talking about the mutinies, that the mutinies weren't available well after fifty years had passed, after the mutinies in World War I. So, he used captured German documents, not French documents because they weren't available to him. What he did in this book was to show what Vichy and Ptain's national revolution thought they were doing, and why many, many people collaborated. There's a more recent book by a guy called Philip Burrin that I use in the seminar on Vichy that I do from time to time, a junior seminar, which explores more deeply, using these archives that are now available, the whole question of collaboration. But the point that Paxton made is that he demolished the shield argument, the argument that Ptain and the national revolution had saved the French State, and that they were a shield. If it wasn't for Vichy,

worse things would have happened. When Maurice Papon, P-A-P-O-N, went on trial over eighty years of age, went on trial for having signed away the lives of many Jews in Bordeaux where he worked in the prefecture. He made the same argument. He said, "I was a good bureaucrat. My superiors liked me. If it hadn't been for me, more Jews would have been shipped away to Drancy" or, more directly, to the camps. He was condemned. He died a couple years ago. He was under house arrest. The most amazing part of the whole trial was he managed to escape at age eighty. People drove him to the Swiss border and they found him in a fancy Swiss restaurant and brought him back. But Papon had gone on to a very distinguished career as a bureaucrat in the Fourth and Fifth republics, as did a lot of other salauds, a lot of other bastards, such as Ren Bousquet, who was a prefecture police. The argument was the shield argument. "If it wasn't for us, things would have been worse." But as Paxton wrote very, very memorably, Ptain might have provided continuity for the French state, but not for the French nation. The French nation, what was and is, I hope and I'm proud to say, based on liberty, fraternity, equality. They take those off the coins and it becomes "family, country, work." It used to be when I was there when I was a kid, you could see still these little coins from Vichy that they transformed into centimes. Paxton's book--I saw him once when I was in Brussels. I saw him on a TV show, my wife and I did. It was one of those typical French shows, where it will be about World War II and they'll have somebody who remembered the war, somebody who was in the war, somebody who didn't even know what was going on, and all this stuff, and they interview them. Some guy got up, this sort of rightwing guy, and there was protesting against Paxton's presence by skinheads. They got up and said, "Mr. Paxton, what could you possibly know about the war? You were only twelve years old during the war?" But Paxton became, this was an important part of the history of history. When he was introduced at the Sorbonne, he was introduced by a historian called Jean-Pierre Azma. When he introduced him, he said, "Messr. Paxton, dans un certain sens, vous tes le conscience de la France," "In a certain sense you, Paxton, are the conscience of France." These two events are important in the emergence of what the historian Henry Rousso calls the "Vichy Syndrome." Vichy was conveniently forgotten, because of Gaullism or because of not wanting to remember the bad things that had happened, the collaborators, the eager antiSemites. Now, since the early 1970s, people are obsessed with Vichy. There's all sorts of good work that's been done on Vichy, and the whole period of resistance and collaboration. Paxton estimated in that book that two percent of the French population resisted. My friend John Sweets, who did a book called Choices in Vichy France, a great title in which he looked

at Clermont-Ferrand, because that was where the movie The Sorrow and the Pity were focused on. He estimates, depending on how you define resistance, people that refused to get off the sidewalk when a German officer passed, or people that whistled in the documentaries, the German newsreels before the movie, and the theater, that something like sixteen or eighteen percent of the population resisted. It's a more charitable definition of resistance. The fact is, and I won't talk too much more about this, but the collaboration was widespread. It was not simply an elite. The elites were more apt to collaborate earlier in the war. Later in the war the kinds of people who joined the militia, which formed in January 1943, which was the French equivalent of the Gestapo, tended to be sort of down and out. They were the kinds of people who in Germany joined the SS, many of them in the 1920s, saw it as a form of social mobility. There's a really good film called Lacombe Lucien, that I haven't seen in years, about somebody who--between his ears there wasn't very much. The resistance doesn't want him because he's just kind of an idiot who doesn't believe in anything. But the militia's very happy to have him, and it's about what happens to him in the southwest of France. During the Papon trial, which was maybe about eight years ago, or something like that, there was one time they interviewed a German officer who was still alive. They said, "Look, what are your memories of Papon and the militia?" He said, "If we got a gar, a guy, if we arrested a French guy and we rather liked him, we wouldn't turn him over to the militia, because they would torture him so hideously." Of course, the Germans were capable of and did all over the place torture people hideously, no doubt about that. But the militia were generally bad, bad, bad guys. You saw this in Lacombe, Lucien a little bit. That restaurant scene is so crucial in Lacombe Lucien. That is really the essence of that film, in Lacombe, Lucien, the restaurant scene when they're in there. Collaborators were everywhere. At the end of the war probably about 25,000 people were executed after very short trials or simply gunned down. Near where we live in Ardche, there was a priest in a village not too far away from us. He had Dat--I think it was him-- who was a real fascist, to lunch. After the war, they put him up against his own church and gunned him down. I have an acquaintance a long time ago who worked in the archives in Limoges, where I spent a lot of time. He was a young man then, and was a refugee from Lorraine. After the war everybody was celebrating. He lived in a place called Saint-Lonard-de-Noblat, which is near Limoges. They were all partying in this little town that's twelve kilometers away from Limoges. Somebody said, "Where's the gendarme who sold people down the river?" Someone said, "He's got an aunt in Limoges." So they left all the casts of wine that were left. They marched into Limoges, went to the aunt's house, got the guy, hauled him out, put him at the

beginning of this procession, joyous but also a deadly serious procession, sort of an enraged charivari, and they got him back to where he had done great damage. They put him against the wall and prrrt. Then they went back to partying. There was lots of settling of scores. Sometimes not everybody who had their score settled deserved it. There were cases of people who were misidentified, or simply there were rivalries, but lots of people got theirs. As for Marshal Ptain, what happened to Ptain, he was put on trial. He was an old, old man. They said, "You can't execute an old, old man. He's senile." He wasn't at all. But you can't execute an old man who was the hero of Verdun, can you? So, they put him in house confinement on an island. There were still people trying to get to the island, which is off the coast of Brittany, and bring back his bones to Verdun. That happened only about ten or twelve years ago. So, France--it took a lot longer than the kind of gunning people down and the trials that went on after the war for France to come to grips with his past. Now, resistance. What do we know about resistance? First of all, obviously it was easier to resist in the south than the north, because of the topography. One of the reasons why the Germans occupied so-called free France in November of 1942 was the fact that resistance had already started. The first active case of resistance with important consequences in Paris was at the Metro stop called BarbsRochechouart, which is now one of those places where the police, especially since Sarkozy was elected, they have these raffles, where anyone of color is immediately asked for their ID and made to stand there and be humiliated by the police. Anyway, back then somebody gunned down a German officer, and gradually acts of resistance started. To repeat what I said before, the word maquis comes from a very thick brush that's in Corsica and in what they call in French the garrigue, also. It's a rocky part of the south. We have it around where we live, too. But it was just sort of a metaphor for places that you could hide. You had to be out there hiding. By 1944, by certainly the spring of 1944, and in many places earlier than that, the maquis ruled, at least at night. During the day they didn't. Only twice in France did they foolishly try to take on German militarized units, big units. One near Clermont-Ferrand and the other is near the Vercors, which is near Grenoble, near the Alps. They were just wasted. They were just destroyed. In a village near us, somebody denounced people who were up in the hills, up in the Cvennes mountains. One day the motorized units come, and the parachutes come, and they're toast. That's the end of it. There were a bunch of slaughters down around where we live. People don't like to talk about what happened. I wanted to interview somebody who was a resistor in our village, even though our village isn't where there was a lot of resistance going on. I

wanted to talk to him because I was writing a book about our village called Mmoires de pierres. He agreed to come over and talk about it, then he simply never showed up. People didn't like to talk about things like that. He never did want to discuss it. Obviously, more resistance was in the south than in the north, though it's forgotten often that there was a lot of resistance in Paris, that there was Jewish resistance in Paris, too. I met a guy in Australia eight years ago who made a lot of money making cakes, and then went back and got his Ph.D. in history working with a friend of mine, Peter McPhee. He wrote a book on the Jewish resistance published by Oxford, the Jewish resistance in Paris, a guy called Jacques Adler, who is happily still around. But the most famous cases that you all know about are these resistors who are living off the land in Auvergne, or in the Savenne Mountains, or anywhere that you could hide there would be. Often in French cities you can see plaques saying, "Resistors met here to organize resistance." That's what they did. They took big, big chances. When they, for example, blew up railroad tracks--there were so many communist resistors, and the Communist Party had a big hold on cheminots, the railroad workers. When you go to railroad stations, Rouen, Lille, anywhere you go you see huge lists. Any railroad station you go to in France, huge lists of people who were killed during the war, either fighting the resistance or were shot because they were involved with sabotage. It doesn't take much to blow up a track. They did it all the time, down in the Rhone Valley constantly. There was this woman who was a big-time collaborator in the northern part of the Ardche, where the awful Xavier Vallat came from, too. He was minister of Jewish affairs, totally unrepentant. That meant that he was shipping Jews away to be killed. That's what he was doing. She was a collaborator. One day she walked across the bridge to go shopping on the other side of the Rhone, and they blew her head away. But when you did that, you knew that they were going to pay you back so much. It's when Heydrich--I went to see where Heydrich was assassinated near Prague. When Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistors in 1942, they took an entire village and killed everybody in the village, a place called Lidice, everybody in the village, hundreds and hundreds of people were massacred. They were capable of doing anything. But the point is that in all these countries there were people who were very, very happy to see that happen. If you go to Budapest, when you see the shoes of all the people that were pushed, shot, or just thrown into the swirling water of the Danube, it was Hungarians pushing the Jews there. It was the Hungarians shipping the Jews off to Auschwitz. There were people in every place who were happy to see these things happen. The big lie in Germany is people didn't know. Of

course, people knew. They knew. And they knew in France, too. They knew, absolutely. It fit into the xenophobia. It fit into Vichy's vision of what France would be, a vision in which the Catholic Church would have a much greater role. There were two people executed for abortion during the time, a corporatist ethic, where like Mussolini's corporatism, you'd eliminate class struggle by having everybody in vertical organizations. Everybody's happy to be French, or happy to be Italian, or happy to be German, and you forget the fact that your employer makes ten times more than what you do. The kind of embrace of "peasantism," the resurgence of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc became identified with Ptain, as saving France and all of that. It's all very familiar stuff. They had a plan and the national revolution was something they wanted to do. My good friend, Eric Jennings, who teaches in Toronto, wrote a fantastic book called Vichy in the Tropics. He looked at Guadalupe, Indochina, and Madagascar. In those places, you couldn't say, "The Nazis made us do it," because there weren't any Nazis there. There were no German troops in those places. In Vietnam there were twenty-seven Jews, and they are desperately trying to find these twenty-seven Jews to send them to the death camps so far away, or to kill them themselves. The shield argument doesn't work. They collaborated. In the end, a lot of them got what they wanted. As so far as the resistance, we've always focused on males, because the idea is you've got all these Spanish refugees from the civil war, from Franco and you've got all working-class people and you've got peasants and there are all these males. Yes, they were there, but somebody had to darn their socks. Somebody had to provide them with food. Somebody had to carry messages. It's more than just one of these old movie things of the very young, attractive woman is carrying a message, and charming the guards so they don't frisk her or stop her at all. But that happened. You had to never be so stupid as to have a written message, but you were carrying verbal messages. In places you could hide food, such as where we live, or out near where we live. Somebody has to take these people food. Also, another thing is the Catholic Church, this business about the pope helping Jews is just sheer nonsense and nobody should ever be tricked by that. But the complicated role of the Catholic Church in France, there was the archbishop of Toulouse, who was a very courageous guy who said, "Don't hurt anybody," who was encouraging really resistance implicitly. The archbishop of Albi, which is only an hour drive if that from Toulouse, he seemed an outright collaborator. In many places, Catholic clergy who are opinion leaders in their village, along with the schoolteachers, were very, very important in helping give a moral kind of stamp to acts of resistance.

There's a good book on the resistance by a guy called H.R. Kedward. He's got two books about the resistance, one about resistance in urban areas, particularly Lyons and Montpellier, and how people kind of got together. You had to be careful about who you talked to. You're waiting for a train, the train is late because it's the war, you're kind of feeling each other out. But you'd better be damn careful you're not talking to some denouncer. You're toast if you talk to the wrong person. But it's about how you can make resistance happen. It's about, for example, printing out just little type scripted things that say, "Do not come and hear the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra when they play in Lyons." All you do is you get on a bus with those things, and you're in the back seat, and the bus turns the corner and you just let them go. The wind takes them. His other book that's really good is called In Search of the Maquis, which is about precisely what I'm talking about. It's about the resistance in the south, and looking at people who resisted. He has an interesting story. There were a lot of villages that were Protestant villages that suffered greatly during all the wars of religion. A couple were noteworthy in that after the wars of religion, the king had these huge mission crosses, huge crosses of conquest put up over the village, which were essentially Protestant and remained Protestant villages. Did those signs help identify the Catholic Church that had been the enemy of those Protestants in the old days with Vichy? Quite possibly. But it's what John Sweets called "choices in Vichy France." Things happened that made you take a choice. What was one of those things? The most important was the STO, the service du travail obligatoire, which I wrote in the notes, the "obligatory work service." The deal was basically that if you agreed to work in a German factory, they would let prisoners of war go and all that. It doesn't work out like that. These people were fools. Two people from our village went. One was dead drunk. Someone told him he was going to a party. So, he got on the bus. The next stop is the Rhineland. Of course, those people are wasted by the bombing, because the Allies are the masters of the air for the last couple years of the war. They systematically devastate those factories. A lot of those people in the STO that went were killed, left the earth. What the STO did is it made people take a choice. If you didn't show up on the 9th of February, or you pick the date, 1944, you didn't go. If you're sitting in your village, they're going to come and take you. At that point--choices in Vichy, France--"I'm going to go in the resistance," big choice. You go in the resistance. You live off the land. Sometimes just a couple people, sometimes lots of people, international mix. Lots of Poles were there, lots of Spaniards, but most of the people were French. One of the interesting things is that the resistance itself did not, unlike almost

every big political event in France since the Revolution to 1981, did not follow traditional lines between right and left. Leftwing regions did not have a monopoly on the resistance. There was tons of resistance in Brittany. There was tons of resistance in Normandy. Eisenhower after the war said the French resistance was worth an entire division, or two divisions, I can't remember exactly what he said. Of course, they helped prepare the way in Normandy for the invasion of June 6, 1944. That old left-right dichotomy does not work in terms of regions. It does work in terms of what people were more likely to resist. Working people were more likely to resist, because their unions had been broken by Vichy, because they were more apt to have supported the Popular Front. "No to the France of the aperitif" was the cry of the right in 1936. "No to the France of drinking before lunch," and all of this. "No to the France of the Jew Blum." "Better Hitler than Blum" over and over again. Working people and peasants, like the ones who said, "Nous sommes rouge, comme le vin," that I mentioned before, are more apt to resist. Now, why does the Communist Party have such a privileged role in the resistance? After the war, they called themselves the party of 75,000 martyrs. That may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Whenever there was a shooting, whenever there was a Nazi gunned down, whenever there was a railroad track blown up, carrying munitions, carrying soldiers, carrying whatever, whenever they couldn't get through, who were the ones who are first, when they go to the mayor and say, "Who do you want shot?" The communists would be the first to go, always. The forts around Paris and these other places, there were communists put up against the wall all the time. They were the most likely to resist, along with other Gaullists. Jean Moulin, the prefect of the Eure-et-Loir who was hideously tortured without revealing any secrets, was one who was sent out to try to unify the resistance. Why were the communists so effective? Because the Communist Party are organized into cells. We still get little notices in our mailbox saying that the Communist Party, the cell of Balazuc where we live, all four people in the Communist Party are going to meet together and to drink illegal wine, to drink a wine called Clinton. I was once asked to describe the fall of capitalism. I had to say, "It's really not falling yet." The point is that they were already organized. These networks were not destroyed by the war, were not destroyed by it. They existed, the comradeship. If you were a communist, you'd been a communist since the 1930s, you trusted those people. You were apt to fall in with them. There were two people, one of whom is still alive. He spent a lot of time in prison in Paris, a painter. He's now ninety-five. He's a friend of mine. He and his wife, the first vacations, they took a double bike. They pedaled all the way from Paris down to our village, which they had

subsequently made their home. They joined the Communist Party in 1933 and 1935. He was a big time resistor. He was damn lucky to escape with his life. He was scheduled to be executed and he wasn't. He painted people in the prison. I've seen his paintings. The socialists weren't organized in that way. Sometimes after the war the communists said, "Aha! The socialists weren't the big resistors." Well, many did, individually. Lon Blum was lucky not to have been executed. He survived the war in prison. He was put on trial at a place called Riom, right near Clermont-Ferrand. He survives the war. But there was a Catholic resistance. I have very old friends, much older than me, who went from the leftwing Catholic resistance into the Communist Party, into the Socialist Party, kind of the normal trajectory of those things among militants. They were resistors also. Protestants are more known for having resisted because of some very famous events. But remember, only five percent of the French population is Protestant. There's a village called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which in Haute-Loire, but near Ardche. They had a cottage industry of making fake IDs for Jewish children from Lyons and Sainttienne who were kept in this small village and who were saved, who were saved because of these people. Whenever the Germans would come through, which wasn't that often, they would hide the children, or the Germans would go through and say, "My god, there are a lot of children. Well, these are practicing Catholics, aren't they?" They weren't. They were practicing Protestants. Those are the more famous cases, but lots of people resisted. Lots of people resisted, but lots of people collaborated, and many other people were indifferent. That's the way it is. I want to close with a story of Oradour-sur-Glane, because somebody who wrote this book called Martyred Village, both in French, chez Gallimard, and in English with Cal Press, was somebody who took this course with me a long time ago, and was in Ezra Stiles College, Sarah Farmer. There was a village near Limoges where, when the Germans were leaving, they were leaving, getting the hell out, going north after this massacre in Tulles that I alluded to. Suddenly they show up in the village and they shoot all the men, and they put the men, and the women, and the children, in a church and they kill them. They blow the church up. One woman escaped through the little window. A very thin lady escaped through the little window behind it. They destroyed the entire village. People who had taken the tram to the market in Limoges came back and there was nothing. Everybody was dead, dead. They left this village standing the way it always--it's still there. Now there's a center of memory. One of my friends is the director of it. Sarah Farmer wrote a book about it. But what's important about it is that this

was the site chosen, the site chosen to commemorate the war. Why? Because it was virgin, no collaborators supposedly, no resistors supposedly. Martyred Village. It turned out more complicated than that. It's a wonderful book, Martyred Village, Sarah Farmer. But what shows the complexity of it is what happened afterwards. The people in this village were gunned down. The women and children were killed by some Germans, but lots of them were Alsatian, who were brought directly into the German army. So, they went on trial in 1953. There were riots in Colmar, in Strasbourg, that they should ever be put on trial. They called themselves the malgr nous, the "in spite of ourselves." There were riots in Limoges that the penalties were so mild. Some of them were let go if they had not joined voluntarily. The others went to jail. The man who apparently ordered the massacre, a guy called Franz Lammerding, they were various attempts to kidnap him from Germany and bring him back to France, but he died a natural death in the 1970s or 1980s. This was the enormous, ironic complexity of the whole thing, of getting into the history of history, of trying to understand what happened during those years, that some of the murderers in this case were Alsatian, and therefore French, until Hitler invades in 1940. So, collaboration and resistance. Great subjects for study, but heartbreaking, just absolutely tragic. The Nazis would be happy to do all of the stuff on their own, but the xenophobia, the anti-Semitism led to those cases of the guys going up the stairs in Paris, and in other cities, and all the patrons signing lives away were French. So, France, as in other countries, it's happening in Belgium, too, are coming to grips with their past. So, it's been a sad pleasure to talk about that. European Civilization, 1648-1945: Lecture 24 Transcript December 3, 2008<< back Professor John Merriman: I guess what I'll do today is talk a little bit about the fall of communism. It's hard to believe, because all that happened, and now, next year it will be the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. You guys were not born yet, a few of you. Some of you were born in 1990. Is that possible? Were you born in 1990, some of you? See, that's after the Wall fell. I can remember seeing on TV the quick trial of the Ceaucescu couple, and them being gunned down in the garden behind their house. They were really a nasty pair. But now it seems like old history. I'm going to talk a little bit about that and then talk about kind of global challenges, and themes that we've talked about. We talk about immigration; we talk more about globalization. But I'm going to talk a little bit about that, too. Let's do that. Then we're out of here.

Again, it seems like this is--to some of you it's not history at all. It's something that we all lived through, and in a way anticipated, and then saw developing. We were in France when all that was happening, and just listening on the radio, and BBC, and all this stuff. It was really quite amazing. The big difference, of course, that made possible the dramatic, dramatic changes that happened in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1992 must begin with a guy who, independent of the fact that the Soviet system just didn't work, but with a guy whose declining reputation in Russia I find just incredible. That's Mikhail Gorbachev. It was relegated a few years ago, he actually did a TV ad for Burger King, at that point, because he needed the money. The fall of his image in the former Soviet Union and Russia I find extraordinarily hard to imagine. It made all the difference in the world that when people in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, which then split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and in Poland-and in other places, but mostly those three places--when they began to push for reforms, and they decide that they wanted to reform communism, and they didn't want even communism at all. The big difference was in 1953 when there were riots in East Berlin, and I'm old enough to remember crossing the border, the Wall in East Berlin. They were squished like grapes. In 1968, when Dubcek, who ends up basically with janitorial duties after that, tried to put a human face on communism and reform communism, there were, as the expression goes, tanks before teatime. The Soviet tanks rolled in and squished them, too, like grapes. They had their martyrs in Wenceslaus Square. One guy burned himself to death in protest. It's still a memory embedded in the collective memory of that place. But there was a big difference. There was a big, big difference, in that Gorbachev made clear that there wouldn't be tanks before teatime. When he went to Berlin, and when he went to Prague and his name became a sign of protest, when they were chanting, "Gorby, Gorby," they're chanting for the demands of reform in their own states. When the various groups had been meeting off and on, particularly in Poland and Hungary, where dissidence was most developed, and where there was an alternate kind of civic society or civic space developed, Gorby's name had become symbolic with the possibility of change. He made clear that there weren't going to be tanks sent in. At that point, these huge changes were inevitable. But these changes in Eastern Europe in the former satellite states really were facilitated, were accentuated, were made inevitable by the fact that communism didn't work in the Soviet Union, that the lines were longer and longer. There was more attention to consumer goods. But also that Gorbachev was a very different leader.

Gorbachev was educated. Unlike Brezhnev, who was his extremely elderly predecessor, he could give a speech without reading it off note cards. Well, Ronald Reagan really couldn't either. But Gorbachev was compelling. He was smart. He was educated. He understood the system. He had come up through the system. And he was committed to change. But until the very end, even when they kind of kidnap him--not kind of, they kidnapped him, and he was held under house arrest in Crimea. He stuck until the end with the belief that communism could be reformed, and that you could put a human face, laDubcek--he didn't look at Dubcek as a model, but on communism. Until the very end, he believed that you could have communism, this good idea gone terribly wrong, that could be reformist. He's very, very different than his predecessors. Khrushchev has often been underappreciated. Khrushchev, after all, did come out against Stalinism in the famous Party Congress, and all of that. Khrushchev was a very wily guy who knew a lot about agriculture and, in some ways, was a compelling character. But his disappearance in 1964--isn't that when Khrushchev leaves power, in 1964?--he was followed by a couple of really orthodox Stalinians. Gorbachev's rise really must be seen in that context. Gorbachev was born in southern Russia in 1931. He worked his way up, as you had to, in the party organization. He studied law at the University of Moscow. He knew the West and respected many things about the West. He also knew how just devastating Stalinism had been for his own country. Both his grandfathers had been arrested on false charges when he was a boy. He was very talented. He knew how to manipulate the system, and he becomes secretary to the Communist Central Committee. Like Khrushchev before, in his origins, he was responsible for Soviet agriculture. Unlike his predecessors, really including Khrushchev, he was less xenophobic. He had less of this suspicion of non-Russians, and the Soviet Union was dominated by Russia, let us leave no doubt about that. So, he believed that the communist dream had been destroyed by Stalinism, and by the rigidity of the structure, and by the inability to enact serious economic reforms. The Soviet Union, like the other powers, had simply miserable economies, miserable economic situations. The East European satellite states were in many ways victimized by unfavorable economic arrangements with the Soviet Union, who exploited them. But nonetheless, they were able to be kept afloat by the Soviet Union. He embraces the--only two terms, I didn't send these out, to be remembered, I suppose. One is the policy of liberalization which is called glasnost, openness in government combined with a greater degree of free expression. He takes people who are liberals, who are real reformers not just party hacks, and he gives them positions of responsibility. He realized that if you live in

northern Russia, you can see Finnish television. If you live in Estonia, where the language is somewhat similar to Finnish, that most difficult of languages, you can see what's going on. These images of, as in East Berlin, West Berlin and of a different way of life. You can't simply pretend that there wasn't a better way of life for many people. There were lots of people in the former Soviet Union who may have had their doubts within the following ten years about the kind of runaway, bandit capitalism, the high-crime capitalism that developed in the victimized Russia, and Bulgaria, in particular, and in other places as well. He spoke openly, publicly about the failings of the system. That was the hush-hush where you didn't talk about the failings of the system. You were always talking about the "radiant future." Remember the radiant future. But the future wasn't radiant. There were long lines. It just simply didn't work. He realized that if you're going to supply the cities with consumer goods, you have to return to the free market. You really have to return to the old New Economic Policy that you already know about in the early 1920s. Also, the second is perestroika, the restructuring of the whole system with the belief, that he had, that communism could be made responsible to the desires of ordinary people in the Soviet Republic. He said--and he could toss off memorable phrases very easily, he was an extremely bright guy. He's still very much alive. "We need a revolution of the mind." You had to recommence with zero. You had to begin from the beginning and reconstruct this reformed communism that would be responsive to ordinary people. It didn't work out the way he thought it was going to work out. The entire system collapsed. Three things made this possible, the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern and Central Europe. First, within all of these states--but most notably the Baltic states where people held hands, they formed a human chain all the way across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia holding hands, a human chain across the entire Baltic region--these places had strong nationalist movements, such as the Lithuanian movement that we discussed earlier. These continued. But also in Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and in Poland, but also in Ukraine. Remember, Ukrainian is a different language. It's a related but different language. There's still huge problems because so many Russians still live in Ukraine. We don't have time to talk about the ethnic complexities of these regions. The Russians who were left in Latvia, there were more Russians in Latvia than in Estonia or Lithuania, faced all sorts of discrimination. This is a problem. Anyway, these cultural demands, these nationalistic demands could not be placated by talk about a reformed communism. In the Soviet Union, the idea that the republics were equal was a sheer myth. The idea that there would be tolerance, toleration of different

ways of looking at the world--basically, there was some showcase stuff about the flowering of the cultures, but it was basically myth. Secondly, in 1989 in these countries, amid economic crisis, the great horrors of deprivation, the long lines of people wearing threadbare coats waiting for trams that were late, a reform movement, a politically democratic movement emerges in all of these states. In Russia it was led by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov, who had helped develop, of all things, the hydrogen bomb. Then, whereas the works of Solzhenitsyn--Solzhenitsyn, whose vision--you have to separate Solzhenitsyn's critique of the gulag from his vision of the return of the czar, or whatever. Solzhenitsyn, I used to run into him here in the Sterling Memorial Library. He was here for a year or two working in the stacks, in the collection there. Solzhenitsyn, whereas before his stuff on the gulag was passed from hand to hand, typed scripts passed secretly from hand to hand, you could read it. You could read Solzhenitsyn on what was the increasingly no longer hidden secret of the gulag, and what happened to people sent to the gulag. These dissidents begin to reach an increasing audience within all of these countries, within all of the Soviet Republics and in the United States. Gorbachev comes to Washington, D.C. in the Mall, and he scares the hell--in a country that had had political assassinations, you will remember this one--out of those people who were supposed to protect him. He leaves the limousine, and he plunges into the crowd, and gives the Russian equivalent of high fives and shakes hands with people. They were just scared to death someone was going to blow them away. He charms the Reagans, and of course his intellectual capacity was many times those folks. His interest, I shouldn't have said capacity, his interest. He charms people. He was a real live, functioning intellectual in politics, obviously committed in putting his reputation and putting the whole estate on the line. This was the second thing. Third, it was the extenuation, acceleration of this economic crisis. Things weren't getting better. Poland is the great example of that, the reason that Solidarity starts in 1980 in the shipyards of Gdansk. It's bizarre to go back there. They're probably going to close. There's huge pictures of the pope all over the place. But it still is a sight of memory when you go to Gdansk. The reason that solidarity starts with Lech Walesa--and not just alone--and my friends in Poland, who are a little bit younger than Lech Walesa, and lots of other people--is because there wasn't enough to eat. You had a terrible situation. So they unionized. They said, "We're going to put forth our claims," like unions had done in France, and in Italy, and in Spain, and in other places, as people had wanted to do in the early days of the Soviet regime, and they had been squished like grapes. Everybody's been squished like grapes.

The economic crisis makes these three things merge: nationalism, democratic reform, and the desire for economic change. You've got this charming man who takes big-time decisions. Lots of Jews, for example, wanted to leave the Soviet Union. They were victimized by antiSemitism there. They were often treated as second-class citizens. Gorbachev says, "Fine." He says, "Yes, you can emigrate. You can go to Israel or the United States." So, things change. There's palpable change, and people have a sense of what's going to happen, that new things are going to occur. The speed with which this happened took Western leaders by surprise. They were not Thatcher. That's a good example. They were not ready for the speed at which these changes were coming. When people are shouting, "Gorby, Gorby, Gorby," the subtext is that we want the reforms in Hungary, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, and in other countries as well, but the movements were much smaller in Bulgaria or in Romania, which was under the police state of Ceausescu. You had the same situation in Albania, kind of the cult of Hoxha, who was very tied to communist China, etc., etc. He makes clear in Strasbourg, in a speech to the Council of Europe in July 1989, that he rejects the Brezhnev doctrine, his predecessor Leonid Brezhnev, that the Soviet Union, as in 1953, and as in 1968, or in 1956 in Hungary--I remember when I was a really little kid, I remember Hungarian children who had been lucky enough to escape the revolution coming to Ainsworth School in Portland, Oregon. He said, "Any interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states, both friends and allies or any others, are inadmissible." Gorbachev says that these movements in Hungary and Poland are inspiring. He found them personally inspiring. So, the rest, as they say, is history. You've all seen images of the Wall, first of young students your age, your age, putting flowers in the guns of the Vopos, who were the East German guards, flowers in the guns. Then the whole goddamned thing just collapses. Suddenly people are pouring over the Wall. People on trains are--and the East German government, Honecker was one of the very, very worst of all of them. He really was just awful. The Stasi infiltrated almost every organization. There's a great movie called The Lives of Others, a great, great movie. If this course went this far, I would recommend you see The Lives of Others, about spying, and integrity, and just all sorts of things. Honecker was saying, "Give these people, return them to East Germany." The Hungarians say, "No, we won't return them to East Germany." They start taking down the barbed wire borders around their own country. The whole thing just happens like that. The Berlin Wall collapses, and within a month Ceaucescus, for better or for worse, have been gunned down in a garden after a very hasty televised trial. They were very bad people. There's no doubt it. But

there was no due process. But that was the end of that. And Honecker, whose slogan was "Always forward, never backward" until the very end--and the Czech leader was very much the same, and the Bulgarian and Romanian leaders, and Albanian leaders--Albania is a case apart--were going to keep the whole thing alive. The whole communist system was going to survive, no matter what. Of course, it didn't work out that way. In Czechoslovakia the group of writers and intellectuals, including Vclav Havel, who had signed Charter 77 and were put in jail as a result of that, who demanded reform. You already had in Czechoslovakia, and in Poland, and in Hungary, you already had intellectuals who were anti-communist, or who were reforming communists, meeting sometimes very openly. In these countries that transition to democracy or to parliamentary rule would be easier, because the passing of the torch was easier. In Czechoslovakia you know there were some parliamentary antecedents. Poland also did. Hungary less so, but you had this sort of flourishing, alternative civil society that had been developing. So, the passing to the new generation, despite all the economic problems, and despite the ethnic tensions that would remain, was much easier than it would be in Bulgaria, for example. In Bulgaria, what the leadership does, they feel cornered, so they try to accentuate antiTurkish feelings, because there were many Turks who lived in Bulgaria. Lots of Turks flee and then they go to Turkey. In fact, they find that things are worse in Turkey and many of them go back to Bulgaria. The tensions between the Romanians and the Hungarians in Romania helps generate change for reform, because outside of Bucharest the big calls for reform and the organization is the work of Hungarians who are living in the Hungarian parts of Romania. But the transition to parliamentary regime would be much harder in those places. The case of Bulgaria is particularly interesting. It's also the one I know the least about. They have just had the change is so slow in many ways they're happening. The kind of banditization, or the kind of infiltration of major crime networks in Bulgaria really continue to run the show. You find that to an extent, as everybody knows, in Russia. But that's another case. So, the Velvet Revolution occurs in Czechoslovakia, where the entire Politburo, that is the ruling group, resigned on November 19, 1989. This is just a matter of a short period of time after the Berlin Wall essentially goes down. One of the interesting things about all this is that despite the huge ethnic tensions in many of these places, you didn't have the kind of awful blood bath that you would have in ex-Yugoslavia, which was primarily the work of the Serbs in those horrible, horrible wars that began bloodletting, ethnic cleansing. Mass murder is a less fancy way of putting it than ethnic cleansing. For example, you had all these tensions

between Poles and Ukrainians, because of the parts of Eastern Poland had passed back and forth, and lots of Ukrainians live in that part of Poland, and lots of Poles live near Lviv in Ukraine. Actually, for all of the persecution of ethnic Russians living in Latvia, above all, but also in Estonia and Lithuania, you really didn't have the kinds of massacres that happened in exYugoslavia. Two reasons for that. One is because of the ethnic religious complexity, in that the massacres were primarily perpetuated against Muslims by Orthodox Serbs who were inspired by one of the real villains of the last century, or any century, Slobodan Milosevic, who died during his trial in the Hague, who kept talking about a "Greater Serbia" to include Kosovo, to include everywhere else. Also on a more minor scale, those carried out by some Croatians against Muslims and all that. That was one major reason why you didn't have that same thing, that is, the religious difference. Secondly is that in Ukraine nobody was really talking about "Greater Ukraine." People in Poland weren't talking about "Greater Poland," imagining annexing anybody they could possibly do, the way Hitler had done, or the way that Milosevic perpetuated his sleazy career as leader of the Yugoslav and then Serb Communist Party by giving inflammatory speeches in Kosovo, etc., etc. So, the whole thing collapses. Of course, this doesn't eliminate problems. If you don't have a real tradition of parliamentary rule, how do you suddenly create parties that are viable? How do you create this sort of civic culture? That's not very easy. Also, the Americans, particularly from the University of Chicago economic school, were giving advice in Poland saying, "You just need an automatic infusion of capitalism. That will solve everything." That's not what happens at all. If anything, it increases the gap between the very, very wealthy people, who formerly would have been party cadres in the Communist Party and very ordinary people. Anyone who follows contemporary Russia now knows all that, or in the Cte d'Azur in Nice, in the Negresco Hotel in Nice. I shouldn't knock the Negresco, I've stayed there while guiding a Yale alumni tour. But anyway, you find these extraordinarily wealthy Russian billionaires buying up everything, including soccer teams in England, while there's still people with not enough to eat. There are other problems. These ethnic challenges, of course, are nowhere more graphically and horribly revealed than in the Balkans. The problem of all of these communist systems-they said above all, you must have large-scale industry. So, they start building these awfully soon out-of-date factories that crank out pollution at unimaginable levels. One of the effects is, for example, the obstruction of the Black Forest in Germany by these clouds of pollution coming from the Czech Republic, to say nothing of the fact that a lot of the Soviet nuclear

installations were in Kazakhstan, and other places, and trying to get these diffused and immobilized, particularly when the United States has been, under this last regime, has been trying to restart the arms race. This is a personal comment, but too bad. I'm talking about how Europeans view America. The Americans now have this idea to put bases in Poland. This is a terrible idea, because these bases could be transformed into offensive weapons, as well. This can very well, as Putin, who sometimes can't be trusted, and who was a vigorous, aggressive Russian nationalist, for better or for worse, that this could start again, unleash, whatever you call it, this arms race, and that would be awful. So, there's still lots of problems. What can I say? Yet every time I go to Poland, which, as I said, is very frequently now, and to other countries, there is just great hope. There wasn't a lot of hope in 1987 or in 1986. Suddenly, there was this new, incredibly transformed world. In many places it was easier to tear down, to say what you are against, that you didn't want this unreformed communist state, or you didn't want communism at all, than it was to sort of miraculously create this new affair or world. In Warsaw I'm constantly amazed. Warsaw was completely rebuilt. When I was a kid I was there. All you saw was rubble, basically. Now when I walk on the Hotel Bristol, a very fancy, famous hotel, and I turn left, it looks like the Champs-Elyses, or the Rue Saint-Honor in Paris, all these fancy shops. As we go out to the university, then you see all these people still wearing the same threadbare coats, waiting in line for the trams as before the communist revolution. Yet, things are better. One of the reasons, by the way, things are better in Poland is that they never did completely collectivize agriculture at all. Petites propritaires, small units still existed, and so the transition there was easier than other places. Well, what can I say? This is what I'm going to say now is how Europeans view Europe. Also, as kind of a European, how they view the United States. I might certainly be tempted at the end to talk a little bit about that, and about human rights. We talk about globalization and all of that. Jos Bov lived in Los Angeles for two years. He's actually a city guy, but he made his reputation in the south of France marching, and with tractors blocking French Air Force installations, trying to keep part of lower Massif Central called Larzac from being turned into a place for bomb testing, and all that business. Then he took his campaign against McDonalds. McDonalds, MacDo, became identified with globalization and with

Americanization. So, the old anti-American sentiment among intellectuals, and Jos Bov is that. When he came to Yale a couple years ago, Jim Scott brought him here to Yale. My

daughter took him to Rudy's. That's what she did. When he came here, he came here as sort of a symbol of anti-globalization. All of you have seen images of people in Seattle throwing themselves against the police, or in Nice against police barricades, or in Italy as well. Globalization is sort of a catchall. But if you don't believe that we live in a more global society, look at the impact of the economic crisis and how quickly that spread within the last two months. It's an obvious thing that we live in a world where Adidas, and all these shoes, and shirts, and T-shirts, are often outsourced to the poorest people they can find in Indonesia and other places. When you have some problem with your cell phone--I still don't have a cell phone, or whatever--but you'll end up talking to somebody in India or Pakistan as easily as you are talking to somebody in New Jersey. One aspect of globalization that is so much more visible now than even fifteen years ago, and which fits exactly into one of the themes of this course, is obviously immigration. There are no borders anymore. The creation of the European Union, for better or for worse, means that you can go essentially from Calais all the way to Lithuania and never have your ID checked not once. I travel on my French ID there. It's only in England and in coming back to the United States that you need a passport at all. But the result is you've got all of these immigrants. You've all seen pictures of bodies bobbing in the sea of Moroccans, and people from Mali, or Tunisia, or Senegal, trying to get into Spain. Once you got into Spain you've essentially got it made. The same passages that Spanish refugees fled Franco's terror during and after the Spanish Civil War bring people from Mali into France. Of course, female and male sex trafficking from Moldavia in particular, from Bulgaria and from Albania, those are the three major points, is something that is just everywhere. Immigrants are not new. In the 1960s these governments said, "Please." They put up signs. "Please come to work in France." "Come to work in Germany, in Istanbul." So many Turks went to Germany. Then, all of a sudden, when the bottom of the economy falls out with the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and 1974, then some of these people who helped make the economy run, and who still help make the economy run--there's a whole underground economy and do jobs of lots of other people--they suddenly they say, "We don't want them." One of the risks that's an obvious risk to anyone who has studied Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which you have, is that economic crisis causes people to scapegoat and to stereotype into scapegoat. In countries like France where the Gaullists made their pact with the devil and joined with the National Front in an over-the-top, aggressively racist political party whose leader was a torturer, Jean-Marie Le Pen in Algeria, and who described the Holocaust as "a

minor detail" of World War II and whose supporters are ngationnistes, negationists who believe that there wasn't a Holocaust. When they start, when their discourse becomes extremely, extremely--not only prevalent but acceptable, then you have a problem. Even in Switzerland, where it is very hard to become a resident of Switzerland, which does have a large immigrant population, you had a party of the extreme right. In Denmark, one of the most tolerant places one could ever imagine, you had one of the most over-the-top--and still have right wing organizations. Jrg Haider, who just got himself killed running his car off the road a couple weeks ago in Austria, he was, unapologetic is probably a bit too strong, but he said things were much better when the Nazis were in control of the economy. We didn't have all these other people around. Economic crisis, and national stereotyping, and racism is a recipe for disaster. Even in countries where democracy really, really works, again returning to the case of Poland, when you have black players being taunted in soccer games. Poland, as in other countries, as in Spain, one of the worst of a kind of racist baiting that goes on when these clubs play. In France, with Paris Saint-Germain, that's another classic example, or Lazio, which is the Mussolini granddaughter's favorite team in Italy, then you've got a real problem. When it becomes acceptable, and maybe some of you may consider unfair, but when Sarkozy, president of France, he's the son of Hungarian immigrants, and when he borrows the language, the language of racism, the language of Le Pen, to help put him over the top--and when someone interviewed Le Pen and said, "Why do you do so badly in the elections?" he said, and he was right for once, he said, "Because they said the same things we're saying." Then you've got a problem. "Fortress Europe" may be trying--all these human rights documents give people the right to emigrate, but not to immigrate. How these countries, including ours, treat people who are legal immigrants and those who are illegal immigrants is a true test of the kinds of values that they have. This is an obvious thing to say, but this is the future. This is an ongoing problem, an ongoing challenge, in every single European country. Toleration, civic harmony, generosity, caring in hard times is under assault. Our country has never been immune from that as well. This is an obvious case, but it's something that's going to concern people that work on Europe. Look at the role of xenophobia in the rise of the right in the 1920s and, above all, in the 1930s. It's the same thing over and over again. Just to end with this. There's the question of human rights. Europeans have a hard time understanding the United States. They don't understand capital punishment. They don't understand why you can just pick up a gun. You can't vote, but you can buy a machine gun at some gun show almost

anywhere you are, north or south. They can't understand that. One of the other things they can't understand is why in this country we have a deep, abiding, institutionalized believe in the right to bear arms, etc., etc., but in civic rights or civil rights, your rights as defined by being a member of the state--but we have often not accepted human rights as a category. Europeans are often just mystified by this. Let me give you an example there. Again, this is not politics, but I can't help saying this. It's very difficult to explain to people how it is that the United States in the last few years finds itself on a list of countries that torture. Not big-time, not Nazi Germany, not Stalin, not even the level of Pinochet, who they tried to extradite and they tried to do everything. Not on the level of Milosevic, who finally was carted off to tribunal. But the United States, in the smirks of President George Bush, and Cheney, and these people, these people put us on the list of torturers. Guantanamo hurt the United States, the view that people have of the United States, in ways that are simply unimaginable. The idea that these people--some of them are some really bad people, other people just got sort of caught up in the wrong thing--but even if they're bad people, they never had charges pressed against them. You see them chained to the ground with their little orange uniforms. You see the images that came out of the prisons, or you have Blackwater or these private contractors gunning down civilians with impunity. This stuff didn't used to happen in this country. Even during Vietnam, when Lieutenant Calley, who murdered all those people in Vietnam-you don't remember Vietnam. Bob sitting amng you and a few others remember Vietnam-Calley went on trial. But when states become involved with this, with kidnapping people off the streets, what do they call it? And secret plane flights to England, or to wherever, this is what made the United States lose so much of its image, of its respect. It's incredible. Even in a place that I live with 330 people--and people are not terribly politicized, politics is still families that have hated each other for generations--but there is this image of, "How could this happen in the United States?" It was always the place that you wanted to go to, because things were fair. Things were right. I believe, nobody asked me, but since we're talking about the view of Europeans, I believe that people like Bush and Cheney ought to go before the tribunal at The Hague, if human rights is going to mean anything. Because they are from the most powerful country in the world doesn't mean that they shouldn't face the same kind of standards that you all believe. It should be that way. Bernard Kouchner is a sort of moderate politician in France. He's somewhat socialist, but he's in the government of Sarko, Sarkozy. He was the one who helped one of the original creators of Mdecins sans frontires, Doctors Without Borders. French,

but not just French, Americans and other people, many of you may do this, go off and try to help. I have a friend who's a physician's assistant who goes off to Guatemala all the time to help people in Nicaragua. Kouchner is a really good guy. He's very pro-American. He said--this is just chilling, it ought to be chilling for you--he said that the magic is done. "The magic is over." That's exactly what he said. He said it in English, too. He said, "The magic is over." What was the magic? It was what this country represents to Europeans. The magic is over. Then he paused and he said, "Things will never be the same again." So, I guess just in conclusion, it's up to you to believe in human rights and believe in the value of people, whether they're clandestine, or legal immigrants or not, and that human rights should be written on the face of this country as well, and that you can return and restore that magic.